Counting LLM Tokens in Python: tiktoken vs a Dependency-Free Heuristic
This story is from 2026-10-13. It is preserved in the archive; the latest stories are on the live feed.
Every LLM feature I build eventually needs to answer one question: how many tokens is this? Context windows are measured in tokens, cost is measured in tokens, and truncation happens in tokens. Characters and words are close enough to lie to you and not close enough to trust. There are two ways to…
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- 2026-10-13 09:30 · DEV Community — AI
Counting LLM Tokens in Python: tiktoken vs a Dependency-Free Heuristic