Token Usage Is the New RAM Usage

There's a generational marker in software. Ask any dev who built things in the early 2000s and they'll tell you: RAM was the thing you watched. Every allocation mattered. Every leak was a crisis. Now it's tokens. I've been building solo for about a year, and somewhere in the last six months, the mental model shifted. I stopped thinking about memory budgets and started thinking about token budgets. How much context am I feeding this request? What's the cost of this prompt chain? Why did that workflow chew through 50k tokens when I expected 5k? It's the same feeling. Just a different resource. The Invisible Meter The thing about RAM was you had OS tools for it. Activity Monitor, top, htop — you could see the number climbing in real time. You trained yourself to notice. With tokens, I had nothing. I'd finish a coding session and open my API dashboard to find a number that didn't match my mental model at all. Sometimes way higher. Sometimes a workflow I thought was "lightweight" had been h