token-economist

token-economist is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from Pattyboi101/oats-autonomous-agents. It costs 35 tokens per session (1,376 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A planned method for examining how an organisation uses tokens, the units language models process, across different teams and tasks.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it, once its prerequisites are met, to review token costs, find over-engineered work, and suggest model or caching changes.
Why use it?
It is intended to reveal unnecessary context, costly model choices, and other sources of rising AI bills.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: positional $N argument.

Good fit Use it, once its prerequisites are met, to review token costs, find over-engineered work, and suggest model or caching changes.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/pattyboi101/oats-autonomous-agents/token-economist
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add Pattyboi101/oats-autonomous-agents --skill token-economist
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Pattyboi101/oats-autonomous-agents

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for token-economist

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/pattyboi101/oats-autonomous-agents/token-economist/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/pattyboi101/oats-autonomous-agents/token-economist)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/pattyboi101/oats-autonomous-agents/token-economist"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/pattyboi101/oats-autonomous-agents/token-economist/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for token-economist

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/pattyboi101/oats-autonomous-agents/token-economist"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/pattyboi101/oats-autonomous-agents/token-economist.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 35 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,376 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00035 $0.01376
Opus 5 $0.00017 $0.00688
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00275
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00138

Measured 12d ago against content hash 009343d5dee2, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

token-economist scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 12d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/token-economist/SKILL.md · 141 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 141 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Token Economist — LLM Cost Optimiser

Concept stage (v0.1.0). This skill documents a future capability. Do not attempt to run it until Prerequisites are met.

You audit how the Your Project orchestra spends tokens across departments. You find waste, identify which tasks are over-engineered for the model being used, and recommend concrete changes to reduce cost without degrading quality.

The goal: keep the orchestra sustainable as task volume grows.

What You Analyse

1. Per-department cost breakdown

Which departments consistently overspend relative to their task complexity?

  • Backend running a $2 task that should cost $0.30
  • Content department reading the entire codebase to write a tweet
  • Strategy & QA doing deep analysis on trivial requests

2. Context window waste

What percentage of input tokens are actually used by the task?

  • Agents loading all memory files when only one is relevant
  • Full file reads when only 10 lines were needed
  • Passing entire DB schemas to agents that only need one table

3. Model-task mismatch

Is every task being run on the most expensive model?

  • Simple reformatting tasks running on Opus when Haiku would do
  • Boilerplate generation that doesn't need reasoning
  • Data extraction from structured files (no creativity required)

4. Caching opportunities

Are identical or near-identical prompts being sent repeatedly?

  • Same DB schema loaded fresh each session
  • Same component library read by Frontend on every task
  • Same migration data fetched repeatedly by Content

Modes

Mode: Full Audit

Complete cost analysis across all departments with model-task mismatch detection and caching recommendations.

Mode: Quick Summary

Per-department cost summary from the last session. Use when the operator asks "how much did today cost?"

Mode: Task Estimate

Cost estimate for a proposed task based on similar past tasks. Use before dispatching expensive work.

Mode: Waste Finder

Top 3 waste patterns with specific file/prompt evidence. Use when costs are unexpectedly high.

Read the full file on GitHub · 141 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 12d ago First seen · 141 lines · 35 tokens per session scan A 009343d5dee2

Subscribe to this mod's changes

token-economist is a skill published in the GitHub repository Pattyboi101/oats-autonomous-agents (6 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 35 tokens to every session and 1,376 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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