Stop counting tokens

I attended the Pragmatic Summit this week.

One striking thing from the summit was the amount of airtime dedicated to justifying the financial cost of continuously running Opus 4.6 / Codex 5.3. Brags like “We gave all our engineers an unlimited budget for tokens” immediately begged for the counterfactual - you mean that was a real constraint at your company before you stepped in? Why?

In the early days of video on the web (circa 2006), YouTube’s video format was 320x240px - video so small and pixelated that even the worst compression artifacts today would be 10x better. We literally didn’t have the CPU capacity to process more video, or the bandwidth to stream all this video at reasonable cost.

We spent an inordinate amount of time optimizing the heck out of video so it could look good at reasonably low bitrates. We had formats solely for India and other countries where the internet infrastructure hadn’t caught up and people didn’t have fancy 3G on their phones.

Today, these stories feel quaint - in an “okay grandpa” sense.

This is exactly how I feel about these discussions of “token budgets” right now.

Fast forward a few years, and we’re all going to look back at this time and wonder what we were all thinking. Why were you being so stingy with electricity? Couldn’t you just throw a million Claudes at a problem?

Infrastructure feels expensive and something to optimize around, until the costs fall to zero and we focus on building what’s important.

Simon Willison, Django co-creator and tinkerer supreme, was recounting a story of how he vibe coded a custom app using his phone, to help him cook two Christmas meals simultaneously. Laura Tacho vibed an app to match nail colors while waiting to get her nails done. I think this is exactly what I’m talking about.

I think we should all switch into the abundance mindset as soon as possible. The economics of Opus or Codex costs are shaping your ambition. Spend the money, move fast, run agents 24/7 and build everything you want.

What would you build if tokens cost the same as electricity?