Artificial intelligence has become an essential part of modern software development. Developers use tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini to write code, debug applications, generate documentation, and automate repetitive tasks. While AI improves productivity, one important concept is often overlooked: token usage.
Understanding tokens isn't just useful for companies building AI products—it's valuable for every developer who regularly works with large language models.
What Are Tokens?
Large language models don't read text the way humans do. Instead, they process text as tokens, which are smaller units of text. A token can represent an entire word, part of a word, punctuation, or even whitespace.
Every interaction with an AI model consists of:
