Announcing Save The Tokens

Late 2022. ChatGPT 3.5 had just landed, and my CEO and I were trying to figure out what it meant.

Some context: I’d been poking at CNNs and BERT in Jupyter notebooks. My company’s data science team worked with ML and what some now call “Classic AI.” (I wonder how that label will age. Coke Classic didn’t.)

Like many, my CEO and I landed on a simple conclusion: Gen AI was all hype now, but one day it wouldn’t be. Time to buckle up.

So I picked up another side hustle: AI researcher. I tried the models, the tools, the frameworks. Read the blogs.

One of those experiments was Bolt.new — a now OG browser-based vibe-coding platform.

I remember fighting it hard. It was an Abbott and Costello routine: the simplest things went in circles. I burned through the free tokens quickly, signed up for a paid plan so the experiment could continue, and kept fighting.

Bolt.new really, really wanted me to use TypeScript and Tailwind. Neither is a bad choice. But it refused to take no for an answer. At one point it wrote TypeScript into JSX files after renaming them from .tsx.

I remember thinking: you are incinerating my tokens. Please, help me save the tokens.

The name was born.

Then life happened — family, kids, work, sleep, more work — and it’s 2026 and I’m finally building the site: https://savethetokens.com (And now people token flex.)

In the gap I accumulated prompt snippets and learnings (mostly via scar tissue), built tools, and settled into a workflow. The models and tools have gotten much better. They still aren’t perfect. The space is moving fast.

I’m sharing what I’ve learned because:

• I’d rather not lose it. (Middle-aged dad memory is not what it was.)
• Maybe it helps someone else.