Counting Tokens Without Spending Any

I kept guessing at how much context my agent prompts were eating. Not a great way to run things. The obvious fix is a token counter. The less obvious part is that you don’t need an API to build one. If you’re already running models locally, the tokenizer is right there. So I wrote a tiny CLI. Point it at a file, name a model, get a count. That’s the whole thing. ...

June 8, 2026 · 2 min · Anthony Mineer