ROT (Return on Tokens) — Food for Agile Thought #548
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TL; DR: ROT (Return on Tokens) — Food for Agile Thought #548
Welcome to the 548th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 35,528 peers. This week, Packy McCormick and Markie Wagner call token maxing wasteful: AI should compile processes into code, not burn tokens at runtime; ROT (return on tokens) is essential. Deb Liu warns that chasing efficiency gains only builds a faster treadmill, while Elena Verna insists companies need employees with agency, not more agents. Roman Pichler centers emotional intelligence as the capability AI cannot replicate, Jenny Wanger swaps team health scorecards for structured conversations, and Grant Harvey examines who controls Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5.
Next, Gary Marcus questions whether AI IPOs resemble early Amazon or history’s largest capital misallocation. At the same time, Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor argue that AI only compresses execution, not decision-making, leaving engineers irreplaceable. Gaurav Savla offers PMs a practical playbook for shipping AI features, from latency budgets to drift monitoring, and Rich Mironov warns that funding software as one-time projects kills products past v1.0. Also, Sean Goedecke examines why trust between engineers and PMs erodes so quickly.
Lastly, Ara Kharazian reports that top firms spend $7,449 per employee per month on AI, with Anthropic overtaking OpenAI. Yet, Kristin Broughton, Mark Maurer, and Jennifer Williams find that only 26% of companies fully track those costs. Ruben Dominguez believes most organizations overestimate their AI maturity by two levels, and Cris Beswick adds that declining empathy and psychological safety quietly dismantle the capacity to innovate. Finally, Ben Maraney shows what structured adoption looks like through Forter’s agent sprint.
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🏆 The Tip of the Week: ROT (Return on Tokens)
Packy McCormick and Markie Wagner: Return on Tokens (ROT)<br>Packy McCormick and Markie Wagner suggest that tokenmaxxing is wasteful and that AI should serve as a compiler turning business processes into deterministic...