Token-Maxing Is Just the Mythical Man-Month Again

Everyone's racing to use more tokens.

More agents. More orchestration. More AI talking to AI, coordinating, delegating, handing work down the chain. It feels like scale. It feels like power.

I keep thinking about The Mythical Man-Month.

the old problem, restated

Fred Brooks figured this out in 1975. Adding more people to a late software project makes it later. Bigger teams don't move faster — they move slower, because communication costs scale faster than output does. The coordination overhead eats you.

We spent decades learning to keep teams small.

And now the hot take is: spin up a swarm of agents, have them talk to each other, token-max your way to productivity. We're rebuilding the exact inefficiency we spent fifty years trying to eliminate. Same problem, new substrate.

I tried one of the more ambitious multi-agent orchestrators recently. Dozens of agents coordinating with each other, delegating, negotiating. I hit my token limit in about twenty minutes. Nothing got built. I'm not writing it off — the project is young and I'll try again. But it was a clean demonstration of how fast coordination without output can burn through a budget.

what you actually want to maximize

It's not tokens. And it's not token minimization either — that's just gaming the metric by producing nothing.

The real target is something like:

(Interestingness + Utility) / (Tokens × Time)

You want the best stuff — useful, interesting, pointing somewhere new — and you want it fast, using as few tokens as it takes. But tokens and time can trade against each other. Burn more tokens if it compresses time. The ratio can still go up. That's not waste, that's a worthwhile exchange.

What this formula kills is the failure modes on both ends: the team that token-maxes its way to mediocrity, and the team that penny-pinches itself into paralysis.

this is actually a life formula

Here's the thing. I didn't come up with this for AI.

I've been running a version of it my whole career — maximizing interesting and useful per hour, so I could go be a person. I love reading. I love thinking. I love working out, camping, cooking good food, spending time with my kids. The better I was at producing something interesting and useful in a shorter period of time, the better it was for everyone relying on me — and the better it was for me.

Tokens are just a new input cost I had to figure out where to put. They go in the denominator. They're a cost and a feature.

rails already answered most of the questions

I've been a Rails developer for a long time. One pertinent reason I absolutely love it: it's made the decisions that don't need to be my decisions.

Convention over configuration. Settled answers to table-stakes questions. Twenty years of baked-in practice. When I sit down to build something, I'm not negotiating the database layer or wiring up authentication or thinking through deployment. Those are answered. I get to focus on taste. What am I building? What does it do? What value does it actually deliver?

That's always been the lever Rails gives a solo developer or small team. With AI it's multiplied.

When I'm working with Claude Code on a Rails app, we're not reinventing wheels. The 37signals DNA is in the framework. There's no sub-agent to figure out the API, no sub-agent arguing about front-end state, no sub-agent negotiating first principles with another sub-agent.

One focused agent, with strong conventions behind it, produces more than a swarm splitting up ambiguity. Less coordination overhead. Fewer tokens on AI-talking-to-AI. The denominator shrinks without the numerator suffering.

the work life battle

Here's the irony the formula creates.

AI makes work more enjoyable than ever. I'm shipping things I couldn't have shipped before. I'm doing work I genuinely love more than I ever have. And that makes the battle harder.

I've always fought the work life battle ... not balance, battle. Because I love both. I love the work and I love the life, and they compete for the same hours. I've never been about counting hours. I've been about look what I produced, isn't it good? And then going home.

Now the work is even more magnetic. And that means the battle is even more worth fighting.

the gardening

Last weekend I was gardening. Getting my hands dirty. Getting my brain into this world of plants and roots and ecosystem — slowing down, building something sustainable, planning for systems that are going to thrive on their own.

That's not recovery from work. That feeds the work.

All of the time away from the desk — the reading, the camping, the cooking, the kids — it comes back. Different perspectives. Different flows. Experiencing things that have nothing to do with software and everything to do with how you think about systems, time, value, what lasts.

The sauntering isn't the reward at the end. It's an input.

the harness

The people winning the agentic era (or any era, I think) are going to be the ones who know what's worth building.

Not the ones running the biggest swarm. Not the ones spending the most tokens. The ones who've kept enough of themselves intact — enough curiosity, enough taste, enough life outside the work — to point the harness somewhere worth going.

It's not just who can handle the harness. It's who can decide what to do with it.

That's the formula. And most of it happens away from the keyboard.