> First: There's the obvious "If the company is letting me do it, I'll be wasteful." This includes not clearing/compacting the context often. Opus now has a 1M context window, and quality is good to at least 200K. So each query is burning a lot of tokens until you clear/compact.

What is wasteful? If you are costing the organization $x/hr, and spend an hour saving the company $(x*0.5), you didn't save money, you wasted it.

To the company, are you spending more time being token efficient to save less money than they're paying you for the time? That's not even getting into opportunity costs.

There is some extreme wasteful spending of AI tokens out there. But trying to get below $3k/month in token costs is often of questionable value.