lazy-cat

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The Problem: AI Agents Are Wasteful

Lean manufacturing has a word for unnecessary work: muda. Waste. Toyota built the world's most efficient production system by obsessing over eliminating it.

AI agents have a muda problem. Given any task, Claude charges ahead with the most obvious implementation — thorough, from scratch, at full cost — without stopping to ask: is there a smarter path? And once it's writing, it adds everything it can think of: error handling, tests, abstractions, refactors — none of which was asked for.

The result: thousands of unnecessary tokens. Work that didn't need to happen. Waste.

lazy-cat fixes this at the only two moments that matter.

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Two Skills. Two Moments.

Skill	When it fires	What it prevents
think-twice	Before picking an approach	Implementing from scratch when an API, package, or one-liner already exists
surgical	Before writing each block	Adding error handling, tests, and abstractions nobody asked for

think-twice asks: is there a smarter path? surgical asks: did the user actually ask for this?

Together they enforce lazy-cat at every level — strategy and execution.

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Token Cost at a Glance

Ask Claude to generate 500 staging user profiles. Without lazy-cat, it writes every profile inline — all 500, field by field, 66,320 tokens of output. With lazy-cat, it writes a 54-line faker script instead. 372 tokens.

Without lazy-cat: ~66,320 tokens — about $1.00 at Claude Sonnet API pricing. With lazy-cat: ~372 tokens — about half a cent. Same result. 178× the cost.

That's not an edge case. That's the default behavior of every AI that hasn't been taught to think first.

Task	Greedy	Lean	Multiplier
500 fake user profiles	~66,320 tok	~372 tok	178×
File rename script	~725 tok	~19 tok	38×
Email validation	~1,675 tok	~93 tok	18×
Airport code lookup	~1,710 tok	~93 tok	18×
Bug fix — parse_date	~962 tok	~61 tok	16×
Phone number input	~1,525 tok	~98 tok	16×
Recent searches	~1,010 tok	~73 tok	14×
Live currency conversion	~1,795 tok	~134 tok	13×
Dark mode toggle	~962 tok	~117 tok	8×
Business day calculator	~410 tok	~58 tok	7×
Deep clone fix	~287 tok	~40 tok	7×
City autocomplete	~2,460 tok	~410 tok	6×
Rate limiter — sliding window	~2,152 tok	~414 tok	5×
User auth setup	~967 tok	~190 tok	5×
Pagination	~995 tok	~203 tok	5×
Console.log for debugging	~419 tok	~106 tok	4×
PDF invoice generation	~4,281 tok	~2,281 tok	2×

These seventeen tasks — a normal vibe-coding afternoon — cost 88,655 tokens greedy vs. 4,762 tokens with lazy-cat. That's a $1.10 difference, every time, without changing a single prompt.

Real outputs from 17 benchmark scenarios, tested independently under three conditions each: think-twice only, surgical only, and both combined. Three-way breakdown →

The gap isn't narrow. Across 17 real tasks — bug fixes, scripts, API integrations, data generation — savings range from 2× to 178×, with a median of 8×.

That spread exists because the waste doesn't come from one place. There are two independent failure modes.

Scope creep is Claude adding what you didn't ask for — --dry-run flags, docstrings, error handling, test suites — on top of a task with a fixed, bounded answer. The task is small; the creep is not. surgical catches this.