Stop counting tokens, start counting what ships

Summary

Agentic coding tasks can use 10 to 50 times more tokens than a basic chat prompt, and per-token pricing makes the most valuable workflows the most expensive. The article argues that cost per merged pull request, tracked alongside rework and defects, is a better measure than cost per token. It also recommends routing routine work to self-operated open-weight models and reserving frontier models for difficult tasks.

Mitigation

Use cost per merged pull request (total AI-assisted development cost divided by changes that pass review and are merged), tracked with rework and defects. Route difficult planning to frontier models and suitable work such as code generation, test creation and refactoring to self-operated open-weight models, using a gateway that routes by task complexity, data sensitivity, cost and latency. Evaluate candidate models against your own code, tests and acceptance criteria before production use.

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