> There is another pressure building underneath all this. AI usage will become more visibly metered. The current enterprise feeling of “everyone has access, don’t worry too much about the bill” will not hold forever, at least not in the form people are getting used to. ...

> I do not want to make this a cost panic story, that would be the least interesting way to think about “rented intelligence”. The question is not how to minimize token spend in the abstract, any more than the question of software delivery was ever how to minimize keystrokes.

If tokens were as cheap as keystrokes -that is, effectively free- then "How do we minimize token spend?" wouldn't be a question that anyone asks. It's because keystrokes are effectively free that you only ask "How do we minimize the number of keys pressed during the software development process?" if you're looking for an entertaining weekend project. If keystrokes cost as much per unit of work done as the -currently heavily subsidized- cost of tokens from OpenAI and Anthropic, you'd see a lot of focus on golfing everything under the sun all the damn time.