Where Does RAG Actually Cost You Money? (Episode 2)

<p>GPT-5.4 shipped on March 5. Seven weeks later, on April 23, 2026, OpenAI released GPT-5.5 — and the pace alone tells you something about where this race is headed. This isn't

<p><em>Or: why the "smart" way to fetch Figma designs turned out to be the expensive way.</em></p> <blockquote> <p><strong>TL;DR:</strong> The "fetch a lightweight outline first"

<h2> The Numbers Don't Lie </h2> <p>The AI Engineering Report 2026 analyzed telemetry from 22,000 developers across more than 4,000 teams. The headline metrics look impressive:

<p>You have 200,000 tokens to work with—but most people are still copy-pasting text like they're fighting a 4K limit that doesn't exist anymore.</p> <p>I watched a senior

<p>The organization runs the program. Reserved instances purchased, rightsizing applied, maybe a workload consolidation push across three regions. Spend drops 18%. Leadership

<p>The price page hasn't moved. Five dollars per million input. Twenty-five per million output. Identical to Opus 4.6.</p> <p>Run the same Claude Code call on both, though, and

<p>The easiest way to make an LLM application look smart is to give the model more context.</p> <p>The harder problem is deciding what context deserves to be there.<br /> While

<p>If you have ever copy-pasted a table out of a PDF, you already know what happens. Rows collapse into one long line of text. Columns interleave. Numbers land in the wrong cell,