"Development starts to feel less like writing software and more like orchestrating token consumption."
Nobody’s really talking about what AI coding tools are training us to do. I’ve spent the last few weeks updating my indie Unity workflow to 2026 standards with Claude Code and OpenAI Codex. The productivity gains are real. But the new pipeline keeps bothering me. The “correct” workflow is not just prompting for code. It’s building layers of supplemental files, context docs, specs, and refactor instructions so the model can keep generating, updating, and cleaning up code. And all of it runs through the meter. That is the part I cannot stop thinking about. Development starts to feel less like writing software and more like orchestrating token consumption. You can already see where this goes. Development cost forecasts will eventually carry token usage alongside salaries. Engineering velocity will be measured partly in API consumption. Entire pipelines will be built around AI being present at every step. That is the future these companies are trying to create. The current token pricing is obviously designed to drive adoption. Get developers and studios to rebuild their workflows around your API first. Once switching costs are real, reprice. At that point it is cheaper to stay than to rip the system back out. It is the classic platform playbook, just applied to software production itself. To be clear, I am not anti-tool. Claude Code and OpenAI Codex are genuinely useful. I am using them myself. But people should be honest about the trade: short-term productivity gains in exchange for long-term pricing exposure to a vendor whose ideal outcome is your dependency. Know what you are signing up for.
Future is consumer with AI/UI and providers withs /api and enterprises/bigtech with hardware 💬 and devs with huge farms and cows 🤣
It is much cheaper to replace developer than to switch tools.
Interesting perspective. I have not considered this.
Strarting to experiment with local models to mitigate the reprice shock.
Game changer
When I see how much my Claude code sessions are costing, I start to think in terms of how much I got done in tokens per hour vs how long it would have taken for me to do the same thing in engineering dollars per hour. 😅
We will stop writing good software for other developers to understand... And we will start writing software for AI's to comprehend.
ccusage says I got $2k worth of claude api with my max sub this month... An advantage of the current workflows is that many things are interoperable and nearly everything I'm doing is markdown, meaning any model/harness can easily use the work I've done. Whenever they start shifting into more proprietary formats is my big concern. I'm also constantly experimenting with new models and some of the open source/local ones are actually decent, so as long as I build my systems against open standards I'm hoping to not get stuck in that trap. We'll see I guess.