How to Reduce LLM Token Usage Without Losing Context

There’s a quiet panic happening in every serious AI engineering team today. It usually starts with a dashboard alert: “We’re burning through tokens 30% faster than projected.” The standard reaction is a rehearsed script: Trim the system prompt. Compress the chat history. Use a cheaper model for simple tasks. Aggressively truncate the context. Everyone nods, the costs dip momentarily, and three weeks later, the exact same conversation happens again. The agent is still fundamentally "broken"—it j...