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The Caveman Principle: Why AI Pricing Is Still Broken

DEV Community·Pico·25 days ago
#7ZSBWUDS
#npm#security#javascript#agent#pricing#agents
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A tool called Caveman hit #1 on Hacker News with 688 points. It makes Claude speak like a prehistoric human. Instead of: "Great question! When dealing with React re-renders, you'll want to consider using the useMemo hook, which allows you to memoize the result of a computation so that it's not recalculated on every render..." (1,180 tokens) You get: "New object ref each render. Wrap in useMemo." (159 tokens) No articles. No pleasantries. 87% fewer tokens. 688 people thought this was worth upvoting. That's not a fun hack. That's revealed preference about what's broken in AI pricing. The Real Cost Behind the Humor Caveman exists because tokens cost money. Not abstractly — concretely, operationally, in a way that changes developer behavior. The benchmarks in the repo are striking: React explanation goes from 1,180 to 159 tokens. PostgreSQL setup: 2,347 to 380. Average savings: 65%. For a developer making hundreds of API calls per day, this isn't optimization — it's survival math.…

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