Lesson 1 · 8 min
Why cost is now an engineering concern
Token cost was a rounding error in 2023. By 2026 it's the line item that turns the CFO meeting from polite to pointed. The reframe that makes the rest of this course actionable.
The bill arrives
The pattern is now familiar. A team ships an AI feature in Q1. It's a hit. Usage 10×'s by Q3. The LLM bill suddenly looks like a mid-engineer's annual salary. Now the CFO wants a meeting.
The honest answer is almost always: we shipped without the cost discipline a senior platform team would apply to any other workload. You wouldn't ship a database query without an index. You wouldn't ship a hot-loop image transform without measuring CPU. But somehow LLM calls get a pass.
Cost-aware AI engineering is just SRE-grade discipline applied to a new resource class.