How to count the tokens in an LLM prompt (and why the number matters)
This story is from 2026-09-05. It is preserved in the archive; the latest stories are on the live feed.
If a prompt gets rejected as too long, or an API bill looks bigger than expected, the number that matters is tokens, not words. Here is the short version of how to check one. What a token is Models do not read characters or words. They read tokens: chunks of text that a tokenizer splits your input…
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- 2026-09-05 06:10 · DEV Community — AI
How to count the tokens in an LLM prompt (and why the number matters)