AI
Prompt, Skill, Agent, Plugin: You're Probably Asking the Wrong Question
Prompt, skill, agent, plugin aren't a menu you pick from — they're layers that stack. Once you see that, "which should I use?" mostly answers itself.
Philip Ward
Writing about AI, efficiency, and doing more with less. Engineer by trade; hiker, gardener, and part-time pianist/guitarist by inclination.
AI
The Write-Side Context Tax: The Append That Secretly Reads the Whole File
"Append a line" sounds free — in most tooling it secretly reads and rewrites the whole file first. The read-side context tax has a write-side twin: read-modify-write in disguise.
The Context Tax: Why Your Long-Running AI Agent Gets Expensive — and the One Pattern That Fixes It
A one-shot chatbot call pays for its context once. Ask a question, get an answer, done — whatever you pasted in gets billed a single time. A long-running agent doesn't work that way. It re-pays for its entire context on every turn. So a fat payload