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June 5, 2026

Thinking in tokens

A 245-million-token usage total made my side-project budget feel less abstract.

AICodexTokens
Codex token usage dashboard
The Codex dashboard that made token usage look more like a project budget.

I have been using Codex heavily for the past few months.

Its usage dashboard says my private ChatGPT account is at 245 million lifetime tokens. Since I pay a flat $20 per month with rate limits, that number did not mean much to me at first.

Those tokens turned into side projects built at night and on weekends:

  • A piano learning app for my daughter and me
  • A RAG-based compliance chatbot for laws like the EU AI Act, GDPR, and HIPAA
  • A dinosaur stomping video game
  • Plenty of broken experiments that taught me something

As OpenAI, Anthropic, and other labs adjust their prices, I will need to understand the tradeoff between speed, cost, and quality better.

I already think in hours, dollars, euros, and project budgets.

Now I need to get better at thinking in tokens too.