Why Your AI Skills Should Be CLI-First: A Token Cost Analysis

Many AI skills are written so the model does all the heavy lifting: reading raw configuration files, running shell commands, and formatting output line by line. While this works, it comes at a cost: token consumption that scales poorly.

This post walks through a concrete analysis of a workspace setup skill that illustrates this problem and shows how shifting deterministic logic into a CLI binary can cut token consumption by over 95%.