Mohsena Ashraf, my PhD student at CU Boulder, leads this series on how to count AI by hand ✍️. Her research is in explainable AI, and her particular interest is cost. How much memory does a transformer layer need? How many tokens are sitting in an agent's memory? Where do the computational costs of AI actually come from?
The method is the same in every lecture. Instead of equations and Greek symbols, operations and tokens become 2D rectangles in a spreadsheet, and the area of a rectangle is the cost. Once you can see it, you can measure it, compare it, and count it by hand. Everything happens in Excel, so every formula is visible and every workbook is yours to keep and to modify.
Transformer Ops
Agent Tokens
Loop Engineering [coming Sep 3]
This series is sponsored by By Hand Research.
1. Transformer Ops (Jun 23, 2026) (free)
2. Agent Tokens (Jul 14, 2026) (free)
3. Loop Engineering (coming soon, Sep 3, 2026) (free)
