Counting Tokens Without Spending Any

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Python on Anthony Mineer

Counting Tokens Without Spending Any