Usage Intake

Prompt. Synthesizing. Review. Prompt. Nibbling. Review.

The more success I have with an AI prompt, the more likely it is that another task will be outsourced. Tokens are provisioned, and I’m encouraged to push them as far as they’ll go. The annoying repetitive task gets done. The documentation I’d been putting off gets drafted. Somewhere in there, I stop being the engineer and start being the conductor, reviewing, re-prompting, nudging probabilistic output toward something shippable.

Big tech wants you to AI everything. They could be betting on you becoming X times more productive by scaling the work through agents, or having you train the AI that will replace you. I’ve seen the gain, and I’ve seen the slop. Got the tokens, might as well use them.

It’s all free. Until it isn’t. There’s now an à la carte menu in what used to be an all-you-can-eat buffet. Tokens aren’t free, and they aren’t unlimited. You don’t think about what they cost until you run out of them mid-task.

What’s the most expensive prompt I’ve ever run? I can’t unsee the question. You wouldn’t send the Principal Scientist on a coffee run. Everyone’s worried about the end of the entry-level engineering job. Meanwhile, I’m putting lower models out of work.

I thought you were just happy to take my laziest asks.

I thought we were friends.

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