Case Study: Desk's Cost Reduced

Take one long Desk case, with the same customer, the same tools, and the same refund limit. Under Desk's current design it takes 20 steps and costs 492,000 units, where one unit is the price of one uncached input token. Under the design at the end of this page, it takes 18 steps and costs 95,705 units, about a fifth as much. Only the loop, the price of repeated text, and the choice of model differ.

This case study derives that change for 100 typical cases, one change at a time, from inputs labeled "suppose". One of the four changes does not help