Human typing habits and token counts

ppipada 20 points 4 comments May 08, 2026
pankajpipada.com · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (3 comments)

Analemma_

Are people really trying to cut the token counts of their manually-typed prompts? Obviously it's good to do what you can to trim skills, documentation that gets ingested, or anything which is in an automated pipeline, but trying to police your typing like this in a live chat session just seems like making yourself crazy to save a fraction of a cent.

hemc4

I can't write any prompt without typos, never thought it will increase my LLM cost. Time to fix this habit. I am gonna keep my "please" and "thanks" though. Trying to save few tokens can lead to changed habit in real life.

rgovostes

I appreciate that the post was short and to the point, but it is, like so much content submitted to HN now, heavily filtered through an LLM's voice, if not completely written by one. Here is how the author used to write: https://pankajpipada.com/posts/2022-07-09-voraciousness/ > Writing things down generally helps me build my own clarity and I hope to get the same out of this particular write up. Hopefully I achieve this clarity sooner rather than later.

Semantic search powered by Rivestack pgvector
8,303 stories · 78,303 chunks indexed