Section 1

Prompting Foundations

A prompt is text that becomes tokens, passes through a chat template and is billed by the token. This section measures the four things that go into one request to the ticket router: its price at September 2026 rates, the instructions, a single example and a set of examples. Each can help one label while hurting another, or multiply the bill without raising an error, so each is measured per label and priced before it ships.