If you're a software engineer working with AI coding agents, your job has fundamentally changed. You're the person designing systems that agents operate through — and how well you design those systems has measurable, compounding consequences.
If you're a software engineer working with AI coding agents, your job has fundamentally changed.
What a Token Actually Is A token is the chunk of text a model reads or writes at a time — roughly 4 characters of English prose.
You're the person designing systems that agents operate through — and how well you design those systems has measurable, compounding consequences.
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If you're a software engineer working with AI coding agents, your job has fundamentally changed. You're the person designing systems that agents operate through — and how well you design those systems has measurable, compounding consequences. This isn't an abstract argument about clean code being "nice to have." Token economics turn code structure into a cost, speed, and correctness problem with real numbers attached to it.
You're no longer the person writing most of the diffs.
The Shift Before AI agents, structure was a personal habit. Now, agents write, edit, and reason across your codebase continuously. Read — Pull in files, directory structure, dependencies, past context.
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