Local-Splitter: A Measurement Study of Seven Tactics for Reducing Cloud LLM Token Usage on Coding-Agent Workloads

arXiv:2604.12301v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present a systematic measurement study of seven tactics for reducing cloud LLM token usage when a small local model can act as a triage layer in front of a frontier cloud model. The tactics are: (1) local routing, (2) prompt compression, (3) semantic caching, (4) local drafting with cloud review, (5) minimal-diff edits, (6) structured intent extraction, and (7) batching with vendor prompt caching. We implement all seven in an open-source shim