Your agent session transcripts are precious, keep them
AI vendors collect every coding session they can, yet most teams discard their own. Quesma Shipper collects them into Amazon S3.
Token Economics
Know what AI tokens buy you.
Token economics is the discipline of knowing what AI tokens buy you: how compute is priced into tokens, how organizations allocate them, how agents consume them, and how that spend is measured against outcomes.
The Efficient Token Tree
RootYour token bill
The numbers behind the tree
~66x
input-token spread, same model, leaner harness scored higher
Terminal-Bench, 2026 ↗4.7xClaude Code ~32,800 vs OpenCode ~6,900 scaffolding tokens
Systima, 2026 ↗≈80%of a real provider bill came from cache traffic
arXiv:2607.12161, July 2026 ↗−38% / +6.8%tool-output tokens removed, cost increased after the cached prefix broke
arXiv:2607.12161, July 2026 ↗≈0.1xbase input price for cache reads on both major providers
Anthropic and OpenAI pricing, 2026-08 ↗≈2xbill after a Codex CLI compaction retune
Codex CLI v0.118 regression, 2026 ↗$1,434/dayconsumed by a documented retry storm
arXiv:2604.16646, 2026 ↗$1,500/moper-tool cap at Uber after about four months of budget burn
TechCrunch, 2026 ↗+7.6%cost at low effort in an A/B test of a plugin claiming 60–90% cuts
JetBrains, July 2026 ↗The field guide keeps growing
Longer reads on the blog
Token ecomonics in Amsterdam: Inside the first Tokenomicon
Linux Foundation expands its FinOps with a Tokenomics organization focusing on AI spend. They had first in-person conference in Amsterdam.
Hackathons in the vibe coding era: our token economics experiment
Students had one Friday evening, 18 GB of coding-agent transcripts, and a single question: where are we burning tokens? They found many wasteful patterns in agentic coding.