Whenever I hear people start to talk about efficient token usage — the same people who, a year ago, were USE IT, USE IT, USE IT!!!! Don’t think about where AI is appropriate and where it isn’t! who are now decreeing that all AI usage should be well thought out to see if it even needs AI, done in the most efficient manner possible, etc — I think about early mobile phones. Specifically the big bag that went in a car. I knew so many people who got one and would call from the driveway or garage to say “hey, honey, guess where I’m calling from!” Which was less funny the nineteenth time the answer was “just pulled into the driveway” or “the garage!!!”.

And then they got their first bill. Now, folks buying the bag phone generally weren’t ruined by a one-off thousand dollar airtime bill. But they were shocked by it (and stopped calling from the garage).

The past year has been the “guess where I’m calling from!” Stage of AI. And I think someone just saw the bill!

 

An example we used to use in programming class — the question is “2+3”. Writing 5 is the “scored 100%” answer. You were never asked to write a program. Now, if someone writes a program (which is an inefficient way to solve the problem) and takes user input … they’ll get a good score too. Hard code the 2 and 3 at the top as variables used subsequently (i.e. identify the probability that the next time this code is used, you may want to add 7 and 284), that’s OK too.

The guy who writes this? 75% – mediocre work.

#include <iostream>
int main() {
     std::cout << 2 + 3 << '\n';
     return 0;
}

Well, maybe lower for failure to document the code. I’ve been asking an analogous question about AI since it first hit mainstream. The Ducks, Google, etc all have AI enhanced answers to web searches. Sometimes it’s enlightening, enriching, and useful … but it’s often the high resource approach to answering a straight forward question. It would make a lot more sense to have the “enhance your answer with AI!!!” button at the top and only incur the usage when the top couple of web results don’t already answer the question.

Does it make sense to have an AI agent generate a weekly report? No! Ask for a script that will generate the report (a one-time expense) and schedule execution of that script. The results don’t change (well, if the source data changes the script may need to be updated to continue working). Does it make sense to have an AI count the number of times “ThisString” occurs in your spreadsheet data? No! Use countif() and the spreadsheet can do this for you.