If you grew up listening to 90s hip hop, you probably already know where the title came from. “Get the money. Dolla, dolla bill, y’all!” Proud 80s baby here. That aside, here’s what led me to this.

A few days ago, I found out I was going to have to start paying a lot more attention to my AI token usage at work. My first reaction was not some profound engineering insight. It was basically: ugh.

I use GitHub Copilot a lot. Like…a lot a lot. 😅 Over the past year, AI has slowly worked its way into almost every part of how I build: planning something new, debugging, refactoring, exploring an unfamiliar repo, writing tests, or sometimes just asking, “What am I missing here?”

So adding more limits initially just felt like friction. Then I started looking at how I was actually using AI.

And, well…

Maybe I needed the friction.

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