Why it matters
It reframes runaway AI bills as a pricing correction, not a blip: when vendors meter by the token and per-token prices climb, 'productivity theater' that burns tokens for show becomes the first line item finance cuts.
Tokenmaxxing read
For anyone optimizing spend: the escape isn't cutting usage, it's killing waste. Route cheap models for drafts, reserve Opus/Fable for work that pays for itself, and cache aggressively—before the 2x price hikes Loukides flags make token theater unaffordable.
Source takeaway
Loukides' point lands as economics, not scolding: metered pricing plus reasoning agents that fan out hundreds of calls mean performative token-burning only survived until finance started reading the invoices.
