Burn Radar
Live published free itemAI Token Coach: What Burn Really Means (And What It Does Not)
Burn is the capacity your AI work actually consumes relative to the useful output you get. It is not a bill-shock slogan, not crypto, and not a licence to chase the cheapest model. This explainer sets the shared definition for Burn Radar and everything that follows.
What changed
Practitioners often treat burn as spend only, or as raw token count. That framing hides quality, retries, and wasted context. We lock a practitioner definition: burn equals capacity consumed for useful work delivered.
Why it matters
Without a shared definition, Burn Radar signals, checklists, and courses talk past each other. Teams optimise the wrong lever (price, model shopping) and miss retries, bloated context, and weak routing.
Take
Burn is the capacity your AI work actually consumes relative to the useful output you get. It is not a bill-shock slogan, not crypto, and not a licence to chase the cheapest model. This explainer sets the shared definition for Burn Radar and everything that follows.
What to do
Adopt this definition in team language. Measure burn with output usefulness in view (retries, edits, abandoned runs), not tokens alone. Use Burn Radar for what changed; use later pieces for how to act.
Evidence
No public sources are linked yet.