The Biggest Con of the 21st Century: Tokens
Dev.to AI
•
Generative AI
Com Here's a thought experiment: if you hired a consultant who forgot everything you told them after every meeting, you'd fire them. Yet that's exactly what we accept from AI agents. Every token - paid for, burned, forgotten. The Token Economy Is Broken AI providers charge per token. thinking = tokens = revenue. There's zero financial incentive to make agents efficient. The result: agents that re-derive everything from scratch, every time, forever. This is not a bug. It's the business model. The Scale of the Problem OpenAI processes an estimated 10 trillion tokens per day.