tokens are now more expensive than juniors, and less predictable

I think a lot of companies are still telling themselves a very comforting story about AI costs. The story goes like this: Tokens are cheap. Models keep getting better. A few copilots here, a few agents there, maybe a chatbot for support, maybe some code generation in CI, and somehow this all stays in the “software subscription” bucket. I do not buy that story anymore. My take is simple: tokens are starting to behave less like a cheap productivity feature and more like a volatile labor line item.