AI article
50 UUIDs made my LLM call 4.8x more expensive than the numbers 1 to 50
Community description: A UUID costs about 23 tokens, and when the model answers with one it copies it back at output price. In a "pick 3 of 50 products" prompt, UUIDs were 80% of the input and made each call 4.8x pricier on GPT-5.6 than plain list numbers. Give the model short indexes and map them back in code.
Dev.to | Nov 9, 2026 | Andrey Altrouter
Automated excerpt
Input tokens are what you send, and output tokens are what the model writes back. One UUID came out at 23 tokens on average. The answer has only three IDs, but it's 72 tokens with UUIDs and 9 with indexes, and those tokens are billed at output price.
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