We Cut 94% of AI Coding Tokens With a Local Code Index - Rajkumar Sakthivel, Tesco

Rajkumar Sakthivel details how an unexpected surge in AI coding tool costs led to the discovery that sending excessive, irrelevant context was the primary culprit. He introduces the Code Context Engine (CCE), a local retrieval layer that intelligently prunes context using AST-aware chunks, hybrid search, and relevance scoring, resulting in up to 94% token reduction and significant cost savings. The talk emphasizes that optimizing input context, not just the AI model, is paramount for efficient and accurate AI-assisted coding.