You are classifying token-management tactics by where in the request lifecycle each tactic applies.

Input Preparation reduces the amount of unnecessary information before the request is assembled. Summarizing older conversation history and trimming retrieved passages preserve relevant context while reducing token consumption. Prompt Construction determines how prepared content is organized for the model. Stable instructions and repeated reference material should appear in a cacheable prefix, while variable per-request content follows afterward, improving prompt-cache reuse and lowering processing cost. Output Handling begins after Claude generates the response. Structured output must be validated against the required schema before downstream systems consume it. Once validated, the result can be persisted for later processing, audit, or compliance purposes. Correctly separating these tactics prevents validation and persistence from being confused with input optimization while ensuring that caching decisions are implemented during prompt assembly rather than during retrieval or post-processing.