I was worried about the wrong thing

I recently built a small tool to watch a market I care about. And I have to admit, I felt a little guilty using it. I pictured the whole thing quietly burning tokens the entire time it ran.

Then one day I sat and watched it work, step by step, and I saw I had been worried about the wrong thing.

When I look at how my little tool actually runs, it seems to fall into a few different kinds of steps.

There was the building. Getting the thing made cost tokens, sure, but only once. I paid for it and it was done.

Then there is the running. A script quietly goes out, gathers the raw material, sorts it, moves it around. That part happens on my own laptop. No AI involved, so nothing on the meter. It just runs, for free.

And then, right at the end, the AI actually reads the pile and makes sense of it. That is the only step that keeps costing me something, every time.

The part I had felt guilty about turned out to be the cheapest part of all...

I don't know if this holds for every tool. But it changed the question I ask about mine. Not "is this gonna cost me tons of tokens?" but "which steps actually need the AI to think, and which are just quiet work I can let run for free?"

I guess, the tool was never really the point. Learning to see it this way was.