I burned all my tokens researching how to save tokens

In almost all cases right now, a subscription with a cloud AI wins.

I think it does have pretty good value when you are your own customer, because you can make exactly what you need. For instance, I'm using it to make a web playground in which I can test the board game I'm designing, instead of asking people to pay for, and install Tabletop Simulator. I'm satisfied. I can tell the code sucks without even looking at it. But I wouldn't have had the time to do this myself, the token cost isn't prohibitive, and it works fine.

For me personally, the only reason why i don't use it 24/7 is cost.

Token costs, energy cost, usage limit due to token/subscription cost.

After iterating into many of the same problems OP describes I settled into a similar pipeline. I generate questions with Gemini 3.5 flash and review with Claude. The different vendor generation and validation eliminates training holes in a single model solution. This is True/False trivia so I ask for an equal mix of True/False questions and also ask for alternate phrasing of the question to the opposite variant. Each statement must provide an explanation and sources which back up the claim. I pass in my existing dataset as questions to avoid, but found the model then rewording the questions or category shopping the questions into related categories in an attempt to re-use them. That led to using Claude Sonnet to check for duplicate "themes" and similar topics. Claude also acts as a critic of the question and the explanation. Sometimes Gemini's "thoughts" leak into the explanation. The critic catches these leaks and also catches "weak" questions (basically shapes that I have identified via examples as lazy or projecting the answer in the question). Once the comparative models have stripped out anything obviously bad, my server curls the source URLs and uses Sonnet to verify that the fetched source supports the claim. Any URL that doesn't resolve throws up flags, and I found Gemini was particularly bad at inventing source URLs for sports trivia. Updated prompting directed it to prefer Wiki links over its fabricated deep links into league websites, which helped immensely. Still one of the biggest tells in review is that the URLs don't resolve or don't confirm the statement.

But review is the entire point here. I have to review them all. A question that lands in the app and is wrong reflects terribly. So while I have a trivia app on the App Store, the real complex App is my private admin app that lets me sit on the couch swiping through each and every question sorted by the model's confidence in its own quality and correctness (weakest first). No question makes it into my bank without me reading, checking all the indicators that came from the models and potentially even rewriting the question to make it better. It all happens in the admin app and exists entirely to prevent hallucinations from reaching real users. Early on I was maybe accepting 1 in 3 questions generated, but I'm probably closer to 2/3rds now. Of course not every dismissed question is wrong. The quality checks I've put in the pipeline are probably giving me 80% questions that are correct and sourced, but sometimes they just aren't what I'm looking for or don't meet my standard.

The best thing I ever did was make an app to review these questions though. Sitting on the couch, kick off a question generation, come back 20 minutes later with 50+ questions in the queue. Sort through them and pull out the 30 best when I have the time. That's the real anti-hallucinations pipeline.

And Anthropic clearly shows that we can reduce hallucination in models. Progress is made which you can see in benchmarks.

And at the end of the day, a normal human being doesn't 'hallucinate' but 'missunderstand' things or just doesn't know what they are missing.

A LLM doesn't has to be perfect, it just has to be cheaper with the min. same quality as a human.

So why are you screaming into the void? Because LLM leave deterministic world? A lot of people don't even life in that world anyway.

Spending thousands of dollars on hardware to save dollars per month on tokens does not make financial sense.

If you run the numbers you'll probably find that using cheaper cloud models makes more financial sense than running those same models locally.

Fable is great, but overkill for most tasks. Sonnet and Opus are already good enough for the execution work. I find Fable much more useful for planning, orchestration, advising, and judgment.

If you ask the AI to do more work, it uses more tokens. If you do more of the work instead, fewer tokens are used.

I've been looking at Matt Pocock's skills recently, and they're very useful. But they use tokens. You can do that work yourself without the token usage, and just have the AI do the coding, or you can tell the AI to do everything and pay the cost.

And you can scale it down even further, and reduce the AI to a glorified code completion tool, and use way fewer tokens. But it's not going to speed up your work nearly as much.

For now, finding the right balance is important. In the future, I think things will eventually shift to the point that we just hand most of it to the AI and let it go without worrying about tokens.

And now that you have typed some words into a chat box to produce a thing, you are confused about why other people won't pay money to you for the output of the chatbox, instead of typing the same thing into their own chat boxes.

I found that now that the models are better, at least Codex compaction with GPT 5.5+ xhigh is almost unnoticible. So the answer is: just let the context fill up, don't prune much, the model is smart enough. When you're out of space, have the model summarize and continue from that point. A smart model will know the information pieces it needs to re-read after compaction; it won't make incorrect guessed when some details got lost.