Engineering with agents

Lately I keep hearing a sentence that would have been absurd three years ago: "I can't do it now — I ran out of tokens." These are my notes from digging into Zero Token Architecture — the idea Kelsey Hightower took from a throwaway post to a PlatformCon keynote — and the principle I want to build on it: every AI call is an architectural decision, and the costs that matter most were never the tokens.

Once agents write a meaningful share of the code, my output is no longer typed code — it is delegation decisions. These are my notes on the human discipline that makes that work: sizing every handoff to the review I can afford, the brief I hand over instead of big tasks, and the four habits that keep me connected to a system I am no longer typing into — from Bainbridge's 1983 ironies to a METR result that has since reversed its own sign.

My feeds are full of screen recordings of developers watching an agent write code — and I want to name that posture kindly: it is spectating, not productivity. Closing the line of thinking from Zero Token Architecture and The Handoff Is the Unit of Design, these are my notes on the control plane a developer should never leave: small parallel handoffs instead of accept-all, research and side-effect mapping automated ahead of implementation, and the Log4Shell-shaped warning about shipping code nobody understands — with the costs of the conscious handoff named as honestly as its benefits.