AI Programming Lab

Apr 5, 2026 · Artificial Intelligence

Do You Really Understand Tokens? A Deep Dive Starting from a Claude Code Session

The article explains what tokens are, how different models tokenize text, the role of token embeddings, positional encoding, self‑attention, KV cache, and why output tokens cost far more than input tokens, while also covering pricing differences and prompt‑caching savings across major LLM providers.