AI coding

Estimating token and API costs before tasks

• A Preflight Registry for File Hashes and Token Counts
• Budgeting a Full Mutation Run
• Costing a Caller Inventory Pass Across a Monorepo
• Costing a Retrieval Eval: Golden Queries and Judge Calls
• Costing a Self-Review Gate: Tokens, Minutes and Review Time
• Costing a Wrong Tool Pick in Tokens and Retries
• Estimating a Dependency Change Before an Agent Installs
• Estimating Token Cost Before You Send an Agent a Task
• Estimating Token Cost Before You Write a Check
• Preflight Checks: Printing Token Cost Before the Run
• What a Test List Costs in Tokens and Minutes
• A Cost Model for Tool Calls: Tokens, Latency and Retries
• A Preflight Estimate a Check Runs Before It Queues
• A Preflight Estimate for an Agent Task: Tokens Before It Starts
• A Preflight Step for Every Agent Task: Printing Cost First
• Budgeting a Codebase Read: Tokens per Module and What to Sample
• Budgeting a Shadow Run: Costing a Second Copy of Traffic
• Budgeting the Evaluation Run Itself
• Costing a Caller Inventory Pass on a Large Repo
• Costing a Check Before You Queue It: A Pre-Run Estimate Schema
• Costing a Mutation Run: Operators, Files and Timeout in Dollars
• Costing a Prompt Change in Tokens per Turn and Eval Spend
• Costing a Rerun Before You Trigger It: Affected Samples and Spend
• Costing a Retriever Swap: Embeddings, Re-index and Judge Spend
• Costing a Shadow Mirror in Tokens and Calls
• Costing a Skill Trigger Error: Tokens, Retries and Human Minutes
• Costing a Three-Reviewer Pipeline: Tokens, Latency, Human Minutes
• Costing an Escalation: Second Reviewer vs a Human
• Costing the Review of a Test List in Tokens and Minutes
• Counting Tokens for the Agent's Tools, Not Just Files
• Predicting Review Minutes from a Diff Estimate
• Pricing a Staging Environment That Calls Real APIs
• Reading the Provider's Token Count Against Your Own Estimate
• Setting a Per-Task Token Budget from Historical Runs
• What a Check Loop Costs in Wall-Clock Time and How to Shorten It
• What a Dependency Bump Costs in CI Minutes and Review Time
• What a Golden Test Costs in Tokens, Minutes and Review
• What a Test Gate Costs in CI Minutes and Review Time
• What a Test List Costs in Tokens and Time
• What an Agent's Tool Inputs Add to the Token Bill
• When the Estimate Is Wrong: Logging the Gap per Task Type