You’re probably paying twice for the same LLM response

Series : AI Isn’t an Engineering Problem Anymore (Part 4) It’s a cost problem—and most teams don’t realize it yet. In the last post, I talked about where AI costs actually come from—and how context growth quietly compounds them. But there’s another pattern that’s even more uncomfortable once you notice it: you’re probably paying twice for the same underlying answer Not literally the exact same string. But functionally, the same work. The obvious version Let’s start with something simple. You ask