JSON has powered the web for over two decades — but in the age of AI, its biggest strength has become a costly weakness.

Every brace, quote, and repeated key consumes tokens, and when you’re working with large language models, tokens are literally the currency of computation.

This is where TOON (Token-Oriented Object Notation) steps in. Designed specifically for LLMs, TOON strips away the syntactic noise and delivers the same structured data using dramatically fewer tokens. In this article, I explore why TOON is gaining momentum, how it works, and how you can start using it today to cut API costs, boost performance, and build more efficient AI-powered systems. … More TOON: The AI-First Data Format Revolutionizing Token Efficiency