A Hacker News thread with 208 points asks whether AI agent costs grow exponentially. I have months of real production logs. The answer isn't what anyone expects: it's not exponential — it's discrete jumps. And you're the one causing them.
Long vs short prompts, tool calls vs plain text, accumulated vs summarized context. I measured the real token cost of every architectural decision in my production agents. The numbers weren't what I expected.
I shrunk a Docker image from 1.58GB to 186MB with multi-stage builds. The image was perfect. Hot reload stopped working. Nobody told me for two days. Here's what I broke and how to never repeat it.
Brutal diagnosis, concrete changes, and real metrics. Here's how I took a Next.js app from embarrassingly slow to 300ms FCP — no magic, no excuses, just actual work.
32 years in the dev trenches. Here I write what I learned, what I broke, and what nobody tells you in the tutorials.
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