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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12800 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 8, 2026

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So TL;DR, tokens are cheaper than basically all white collar workers in the modern west, but they get overused for fun projects?

More that they're cheaper than a code monkey, only weakly expensive if you're doing something hard or novel (or novel-to-you), and they can get ludicrously expensive if you just start firing the slop cannons, either to solve a problem by volume or by producing a lot of useless or specialized lines-of-code.

And because they allow brute-forcing problems in ways that weren't possible before, or tackling new problems. Or because the user cocks up, as in the case where they fail to notice their two bots getting into an infinite loop.

The problem is that a token is cheap, but the amount of tokens you need to do useful things can be very high.

For agentic programming, the agent needs to hold a non trivial amount of the codebase in the context. That can easily be millions of tokens. Then you have whatever pile of "skills" (read: markdown files) you use, then add the various layers of prompts, then add reasoning chains. It adds up very quickly.

Once you start adding parallel agents and loops, it can get insane.

It is weird to think back to the time when bringing out a 4k token model was a massive deal. You could hold, like, paragraphs in context. Like, nearly a whole chapter of an actual book.

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