The Token Tax Problem: How I Built a Super Memory Layer for AI Coding Assistants We Solved the Wrong Problem First When AI coding assistants arrived, we celebrated. Faster delivery. Less repetitive work. Developers doing more meaningful things. Then the invoices arrived. Token utilization had quietly become one of the fastest-growing line items in engineering costs. Every session, every agent, every code suggestion — all of it burning through context tokens. And the root cause was embarrassingly simple: we were paying for AI tools to re-learn our codebase from scratch, over and over again. Round One: The Obvious Fixes We started with the basics.…