We Were Paying 3.75x More Than Necessary on Every AI API Call — Here's How We Found It

kavyarani7 — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 20:45:57 +0000

Our Anthropic bill was higher than expected. Nobody on the team knew exactly why. So we built a scanner and ran it on our own codebase. First thing it found:

What We Found

server/services/divergence-detector.js was using claude-sonnet-4-6 with max_tokens=150 to generate 2-sentence explanations. Every night. On every divergence found.

const response = await client.messages.create({
  model: 'claude-sonnet-4-6',
  max_tokens: 150,
  messages: [{ role: 'user', content: prompt }]
});

Sonnet costs $15/M output tokens. Haiku costs $4/M. For a 2-sentence output there is zero quality difference. We were paying 3.75x more on every single call and nobody noticed.

What We Built

A GitHub Action that catches this automatically on every PR — before it merges.

Works with Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Bedrock, and LangChain. JS and TS supported. Zero dependencies.

Add It in 2 Minutes

- uses: kavyarani7/ai-arch-scanner@v1
  with:
    github_token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
    threshold: '500'

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What's the most expensive AI pattern you've found in your codebase? Drop it in the comments.

Hi, I'm kavyarani7

kavyarani7 — Sat, 08 Apr 2017 10:45:43 +0000

I have been coding for 9 years.

You can find me on GitHub as kavyarani7

I live in Bengaluru.

I work for Ametek.

Nice to meet you.

DEV Community: kavyarani7

We Were Paying 3.75x More Than Necessary on Every AI API Call — Here's How We Found It

What We Found

What We Built

Add It in 2 Minutes

Hi, I'm kavyarani7