I'm going to ask something of you. Everything in the middle of this article cost me money to learn. Not tuition money. Invoice money, on my own projects, found after the fact. That's why it's technical, and that's why I'm not softening it. What you get for it: if you build AI tools or pay somebody who does, there's a live chance you're spending ten to twenty times more than the work requires, forever, on something that works fine and will never say a word about it. How would you even find out? That's the question the whole piece answers. Many people can't answer it today, which is not a competence problem. Few built the dashboard. The numbers exist, and fewer surfaced them. Tokenizers and cache math sit in the middle. Bear with me through that stretch and paste anything unfamiliar into whatever AI you've got open, which is what I do. The finish line is nine questions you can ask tomorrow morning without knowing any of this.