Johnson Liu

Johnson Liu

Indie developer. Ship useful AI tools.
#1000807920 followers16 following
#1,523Last month
26 KP
>10,000All time
27 KP

About

Johnson Liu — independent developer. I build small, focused tools for developers and people shipping with AI . Tsinghua Schwarzman Scholar. Harvard Kennedy School MPA. Every so often I launch something new here.

Badges

Tastemaker
Tastemaker
Gone streaking 10
Gone streaking 10
Gone streaking
Gone streaking
Gone streaking 5
Gone streaking 5

Maker History

  • TokenDam
    TokenDamA linter for LLM token spend — that gates cost in CI
    Jul 2026
  • Khotan Studios
    Khotan StudiosMeet the one you haven't written yet
    Jul 2026
    • 🎉
    Joined Product HuntJuly 10th, 2026

Forums

TokenDamp/tokendam•

29d ago

Launching TokenDam tomorrow — a linter for your LLM token spend

Hey everyone I'm launching TokenDam here tomorrow and wanted to share the story a day early.

I kept staring at agent token bills that felt too high but couldn't see why. Turns out the waste is boringly consistent: the same 2-3k-token system prompt resent uncached on every call, a whole scraped page dumped into context, 20+ MCP tools the model never touches, history that never gets compacted.

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28d ago

TokenDam - A linter for LLM token spend — that gates cost in CI

Your agents burn tokens — resending uncached prompts, dragging dead tools, replaying full history. TokenDam is a linter for LLM spend: paste a trace and see the line-item waste, each with a $/month figure and the exact fix (runs in your browser — your trace never leaves the tab). Put it in CI and the GitHub App audits every PR, fails the build on a cost regression, and opens a prompt-cache fix PR. Think ESLint, but for your token bill. Free CLI + web; Pro watches every PR.
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1mo ago

Solo maker + novelist. I built a tool because my protagonist kept secrets from me

Johnson here, solo maker. Khotan Studios goes live on PH tomorrow (Sunday) and honestly I'm more nervous than excited, so I'd rather introduce myself with a real story than a countdown.

I've been writing a novel set on the Silk Road for about two years. For most of it my protagonist felt like a stranger reciting my outline I knew what he did but never why, and outlines never fixed it. So one night I stopped asking AI to write him and started arguing with him instead: gave him his established facts, then just talked to him and pushed. I asked something direct about his past and he changed the subject on me. A character keeping a secret from his own author taught me more about him than a page of notes ever did.

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