Series: AI Isn’t an Engineering Problem Anymore (Part 3) It’s a cost problem–and most teams don’t realize it yet. In the last post, I talked about how most LLM usage isn’t as “new” as it feels. A lot of it is: iterative repetitive overlapping That’s interesting on its own. But it becomes a lot more important when you start looking at it through a different lens: cost. The assumption most people make. When people think about AI costs, they usually assume it comes from: heavy usage complex and heavy queries large models high traffic Which is partially true, but incomplete. What actually adds up. In practice, a significant portion of usage comes from things like: retrying prompts slightly reworded questions debugging loops near-duplicate workflows None of these feel expensive individually. But together, they add up. In my experience from robotics and even outside engineering, anything that compounds tends to spiral faster than expected. The part most people miss .…