Miell’s Law and Token Budgets

TL;DR Conway’s Law tells us that organisations create systems that mirror their communication systems. Jamie Dobson coin’s ‘Miell’s Law’ in a post about the work of our mutual friend (and his colleague) Ian Miell in his forthcoming book ‘Follow the Money‘: Organisations that design systems are constrained to produce systems that reflect the financial structures and incentives of those organisations. We can all imagine how that applied to organisations we know from the past. But I think it’s about to be massively amplified by how money gets converted into large language model (LLM) tokens, and how those tokens get doled out to those using them. The free ride is over Since the arrival of ChatGPT we’ve all been able to use LLMs and the various coding assistants and harnesses built upon them at no/low cost. Chatbot type interfaces are still generally free to use, and subscriptions have been selling the underlying tokens at (fractions of) pennies on the dollar. Many commentators have…