Building an Internal Tool with FutureX: Token Costs and 3 Mistakes

We built a small internal dashboard with FutureX in three days. The dashboard itself was unremarkable — a status board, a few API integrations, and a Postgres view. What was remarkable was the token bill. Input tokens were roughly 2.4x what the task should have required, and output tokens were almost 3x. This post is a transparent account of where those tokens went, the three mistakes that inflated the cost, and the specific workflow changes that brought subsequent work down to a sane level. If…