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Showing posts with the label Ham Radio Exam

How I Cut GPT Input Costs 10× by Turning Off the Vector Store on the Ham Radio Practice Exams

I finally found out why my Extra Class AI Tutor was spending nearly ten times more on input than output tokens. It wasn’t the math, the cache, or the prompt—it was the vector store. Turning it off cut token usage from 17021 to 1743 in a single move.

Vector Stores in the OpenAI Responses API: An Interview with GPT5

I’d just finished a morning round of tinkering with the ham radio Extra Class tutor when the question hit me: how do I actually get the entire exam question pool into GPT without burning through tokens every time? With GPT Projects, I can just drop in a file and it remembers. But on the API side, things always felt a little more ephemeral — every call a blank slate. So I sat down with GPT-5 to dig into whether there’s a smarter, more cost-effective way. What followed was one of those back-and-forths where the clouds part: GPT Projects’ quiet little “remembered files” have a direct analogue in the API world — vector stores — and they might just be the key to making this whole tutor run leaner and meaner. Me: In GPT projects, I can upload files that the project remembers. Is there a way to do the same thing with the API? GPT-5: Great question. With the raw chat/completions endpoint, no — it’s stateless. You’d have to re-inject your files each time. But the newer OpenAI  Respo...