Stop Sending Everything to Your LLM: How We Reduced Token Usage Without Sacrificing Response Quality

Over the past year, LLMs became the backbone of our apps—from chatbots to AI assistants. The trend is simple: more features mean bigger prompts.That sounds harmless until you look at your AI bill. While building AI features for Fanziz —our sports platform handling personalized news, semantic search, and live commentary—we hit this exact wall. Growing prompts meant spiking latency and inference costs. Instead of upgrading models, we asked: How can we make our LLM smarter without sending it more…