How I Learned to Use Copilot Sessions 400 Million Tokens Later

I recently built a Markdown linter with GitHub Copilot CLI. In between, I reviewed other projects, edited this blog, and generally treated one conversation as a terminal into which I could dump whatever I was doing next. I really loved the fact that Copilot would context switch, do some work, then go back to what it was doing. It’s so smart! Well, that may have burnt some extra tokens. Counting Tokens The local usage logs for the roughly three-and-a-half-day development window showed approximately 4,322 model calls, including delegated agents: Token Type Millions Non-cached input 11.4 Output 2.4 Cached input 411 That’s roughly 14 million non-cached input and output tokens, plus more than 400 million cached input tokens. Cached input is previously processed context reused across requests. The same context can be counted repeatedly, so 411 million doesn’t mean I wrote 411 million tokens or that Copilot generated that much code. It also doesn’t translate directly into dollar spend:…

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