alt Hacker NewsAs someone who has only ever used these free AI agents and who is not a software developer or computer scientist by trade, could someone please explain the concepts of tokens and their worth and harnesses and what exactly all of those things accomplish?
Replies
> the concepts of tokens
Tokens are what you get when you have to map a chunk of text to specific numbers, so that the LLM can actually work with it.
https://platform.openai.com/tokenizer
Reducetively speaking:
[Your text] --> [List of numbers (tokens)] --> [List of [List of numbers describing a concept/term/thing/job/item/etc] (embedding)]
That final thing (List of embeddings) is what gets fed into the LLM, so that it can produce (List of embeddings most likely to follow afterwards), which is then turned back into text.
> and their worth
Tokens are priced based on the model you're using. In general, expect to pay more when you need to use larger models. (Note: Exceptions exist, but treat them as exceptions)
The space as it is now prices tokens based on:
- how many tokens it needs to process (input),
- how many it needs to generate (output), and
- how often you send the same chunks of text that their system already has on file (cached).
> and harnesses
A harness is something that adds in tools & directions for the LLM, so that it can do its tasks. In a dumbed-down semi-visual summary:
---
[Text about what the LLM should be & what they're allowed/not allowed to do]
[Text about available tools & how to call them]
[Your text here]
---
The harness, if its part of a program/app, then looks at what the models generate in response, and does the (file writing/reading, tool calls, web searches, subagents, etc.), based on the formatted output that the LLMs should produce.
> and what exactly all of those things accomplish
Depends on the goal of the user. Some use them as assistants, most use it for coding.
https://openrouter.ai/rankings?utm_source=share&utm_medium=c...
A Token is a unit of data used by large language models. Tokens used to be pretty analogous to 3-6 letters of English text, but things have become more complicated with the advent of multi-modal generation
Large language models are usually priced on MTok or “million tokens”. You’ll often see LLMs priced at $X/MTok for input and $Y/MTok for output.
A harness is a program that interfaces with a large language model and provides it tools and context to achieve a goal. Codex and Claude Code are good examples of harnesses.
What exactly all of this accomplishes is not something I can answer for you :)
None of these are effective questions for this forum. You should copy and paste your post and my response into your free chatbot of choice.
Evaluate the original post and response and build a high level learning plan with citations and references that covers each of the topics in the original post. Start the learning plan with an overview of effective prompting techniques with specific examples to research individual topics.