About Wasted Tokens
The community for developers, researchers, and curious humans who've lost money, time, or sanity to AI inference costs — and lived to tell the tale.
What is this place?
Wasted Tokens is a community-driven platform where people share real stories about AI token disasters: the runaway agents that billed $200 overnight, the prompt loops that never converged, the image generation jobs that produced 1,000 variations of the wrong thing, or the single typo that turned a cheap query into an expensive one.
Think Hacker News meets r/ProgrammerHumor, but specifically for the pain — and occasional glory — of working with large language models and other AI systems at scale.
How it works
- Sign in with Google — one click, no password, no separate account to manage.
- Submit your story — give it a title, describe what happened, pick a category, and optionally add the token or dollar cost involved. Stories go through a brief AI-assisted moderation step before going live.
- Vote and discover — upvote the stories that made you laugh, cringe, or nod in solidarity. Browse by category or sort by top / newest.
- Share — every story has a direct link and one-click share buttons for social media, so the best disasters get the audience they deserve.
Story categories
| Category | What belongs here |
|---|---|
| Software Bugs | Code errors that triggered unexpected (and expensive) token consumption. |
| Images & Videos | Generative media jobs gone wrong — render farms, diffusion loops, batch nightmares. |
| Security | Prompt injection, jailbreaks, API key leaks, and other security-related waste. |
| Prompts | Badly written prompts, prompt wars, and the art of expensive iteration. |
| NSFW | Stories that are not safe for work. Flagged and hidden by default. |
Content moderation
Every submitted story is reviewed by an AI moderation pipeline before it goes live. The system checks for spam, hate speech, doxxing, illegal content, and other violations of our community guidelines.
We currently use Ollama to run the moderation model locally, which means your story content never leaves our servers during the review process. Stories that pass moderation are published automatically; borderline cases are held for human review.
AI moderation is imperfect. If you believe your story was rejected unfairly, email contact@wastedtokens.com and we'll take a look.
Community guidelines
- Be honest. Share real experiences. Embellish for comedic effect, sure — but don't fabricate entirely.
- Don't dox. Anonymise company names, colleagues, and clients if the story could harm them.
- No spam or self-promotion. Stories must be stories, not ads.
- Keep it legal. Don't share content that violates copyright, privacy laws, or any applicable regulation.
- Respect others. Joke about AI and costs, not about people.
Who built this?
Wasted Tokens is an independent side project built with FastAPI, htmx, and PostgreSQL. It is not affiliated with any AI company.
Questions, suggestions, or just want to say hi? contact@wastedtokens.com