The currency of the Grid, and the greater AI ecosystem is the “token”. It represents a unit of compute power used by Claude to produce something, read something, analyze something or just think. Claude regularly calls what it’s doing “thinking” – it even has an internal monologue you can enable and disable. Reading the monologue is like peeking behind the curtain to see how the wizard approaches every task.

Enter capitalism. Tokens cost money, time on the grid = money. Money isn’t cheap.

We’re only a week into exploring AI and I’m already wondering, how do we save? How do we streamline? How do we conserve resources? How do we prevent token usage in the extreme?

How else, spend tokens and ask the MCP.

We’ve made some more changes. MCP was given a “token thrift” standing order. This means, no unnecessary spending. Assign tasks with conservation in mind. If CLU wants to build and then test, CLU needs to balance the desire for rigorous testing with the goal of minimizing his spending. On the spectrum of Speed vs. Quality we were operating firmly rooted in the Quality extreme. The orders now are to test with less but focus those testers. The MCP outlined the scenario perfectly. When publishing a version update to the Beat Machine CLU fired twice as many testers at it as the full initial release. For CLU this “was” his way, he was programmed to be thorough to a fault. My bad. The new rule is moderation when appropriate.

The MCP suggested a few other savings measures including, file length limits, Hot/Cold ledgers and a new status board to flag what’s on the go. I’m still not sure what the Hot/Cold ledgers are referring to, more learning needed but I let him run with the ideas. The board is a good visual for me to see what needs attention and what’s been flagged to deal with later. It’s basic for now but helpful.

With the new orders in place I started working again. Didn’t take long before the Status Board was showing me things that I had already dealt with. The MCP hadn’t allowed other agents to update the board so it was getting “stale” with every step forward. An immediate fail state for the goal of the Board. I sent Tron to audit what MCP had built and tell me where it was broken. The failure was in the very root of our system, the MCP approves everything that gets written. No longer appropriate given our new intentions. The golden rule must adapt.

As I understand it, a session or “chat” holds everything you discuss in perpetuity until that chat is closed. Every time you interact, the entire chat is reviewed and dissected for context to help with the next answer. After 8 days all my sessions were packed with so much history and information that any simple request was taking a minute or two to answer. Not a good place to be.

How does the human brain deal with this same problem. We compartmentalize everything. You have short-term memory to handle your current session and you have long-term memory to commit the important things to. We need that on the Grid. The MCP and I worked on a solution. Now when you say Good Night to an agent they commit their short-term session knowledge into memory by appending to their never ending journal. That journal exists so we can reminisce or re-open old ideas but doesn’t clutter up the current tasks. When agents wake up they check their last journal entry and catch up on any fundamental system changes and workloads but they don’t need to remember what happened 10 days ago unless we need it.

The MCP tells me we’ve accomplished net gains. He talks to me in terms of “lines” not tokens. We cut back a number of regular working files from 600 lines to 60 lines. He tells me these are files that get read frequently so these tasks should become more efficient. He assures me we haven’t sacrificed quality by losing 540 lines but either that’s a false statement or we had a 90% bloat factor in place before.

Will all this help or hinder the creative process? More importantly for now, will this improve token usage or have we created more issues than we’ve solved. Time will tell. -Evrtek

PS. 12 hours after the last usage reset, already down 16% of total usage allotted for the week… Nothing “real” accomplished. This better result in gains for the future.