Thoughts on Marginal Token Spend

The rise of coding agents has made it easy for a single engineer to spend thousands of dollars a day in LLM tokens. This is a new class of expense, and it will change the future cost structure of software engineering. We are between stable equilibria today in SWE: the old one, of needing humans to drive any code change, and a yet-to-be-established new one, where AI agents write most code. Taking as a premise that AI agents will write a large fraction of code in the new equilibrium, we will need to rethink the resulting cost structure for engineering orgs. In the long term, token spend will become a large portion of enterprise OpEx, split into two classes: spend attributable to a human worker (e.g. Claude Code, internal AI tooling like call center assistants) and spend attributable to automated systems (e.g. agents which respond autonomously to customers by fielding calls/emails, agents which monitor business systems). Automated token spend is analogous to cloud cost: at equilibrium,…