April 29, 2026
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
Key takeaways:
- The AI-coding free lunch is over. Agentic tools burn far more tokens than engineers signed up for, and vendors are responding with price hikes and usage limits.
- Nobody, including the vendors, saw this coming.
- Managers now have to justify the spend, not just celebrate the speed.
AI-coding tools and harnesses have changed the role of software engineering – and fast. Devs have started tokenmaxxing, with some companies, including Meta, launching leaderboards to measure their workers’ ability to burn through AI usage.
Agentic coding tools have radically changed AI usage, acting semi-independently through command lines, files, internet access, and tool calls.
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April 29, 2026
