AI Prompt & Token Efficiency Checklist

Use AI Like A Better Teammate

The fastest way to waste tokens is to make an AI guess what you mean. This checklist helps you give enough context for a good answer, avoid dumping unnecessary noise, and steer the work while it is happening.

A Token-Efficient Prompt Template

Use this when you want a strong answer without feeding the model a novella:

Goal: What I want done.
Context: Only the details needed to understand the job.
Constraints: What must stay true, what not to touch, style/audience/platform.
Inputs: Files, snippets, links, logs, or examples.
Output: The format I want back.
Verification: How we know it worked.

What I Mean By Steer

Steering is not micromanaging. It is giving course corrections while the assistant still has room to use them. Good steering sounds like: “keep this practical”, “assume a UK family audience”, “do not spend tokens explaining basics”, “make the change directly”, “pause before deploy”, or “show me only the risky parts”.

For Codex specifically, the best steering is concrete: name the file, say what behaviour should change, say what tests or local checks matter, and call out anything it must not alter. That saves tokens because the agent spends less time discovering the boundaries the hard way.