Examples are recurring input tokens on every call — test whether a crisp instruction does the job before you attach them by default.
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More in Prompt Engineering
✍️Prompt Engineering
10-25% on short prompts
Stop Paying for 'Please' and 'I Was Wondering If'
Conversational filler and apologetic framing get tokenized and billed like any other text. Strip the social padding and lead with the instruction.
✍️Prompt Engineering
Roughly 20-40% fewer follow-up turns on formatting-sensitive tasks, in our experience
Fence the Output Before It Wanders
State the constraints that usually trigger a do-over up front, so you don't pay for a second generation just to strip the preamble.
✍️Prompt Engineering
On large documents, output tokens on edit turns can drop substantially (often the bulk of an edit's cost is the re-emitted unchanged text)
Ask for the Diff, Not the Director's Cut
When revising a long artifact, request only the changed lines as a patch instead of having the model reprint the whole thing.