Every time I describe how I run an AI project manager, a team of AI department specialists, a meal planner that fetches grocery deals on the weekends, I get the same question, usually with a wince… doesn’t that burn all your tokens?

Fair question! It would if I ran it the way many people run AI. They paste everything in, let the model figure it out, repeat weekly. I did some of that early on but after the potential bill and the slowdowns, I researched and picked up a different set of habits. Here they are, roughly in order of how much they save.

1. If a script can do it, we let a script do it.

Tokens burn when a model reads and shuffles data. So anything deterministic like fetching, filtering, formatting, gets moved out of the AI entirely. On the personal level, my meal planner used to have Claude pull three stores’ weekly ads and two coupon sites and merge them (that’s 30–50k tokens, every week). Now a 200-line Python script does the identical job on a schedule.…