Jay had built a dashboard. It wasn't strictly necessary—they could check the Anthropic billing console directly—but Jay was the kind of engineer who believed that if a number mattered, it deserved a proper visualization. So on his second week, he'd described what he wanted to an agent and now there was a little web app running on localhost:3000 that showed their daily token spend as a real-time counter, ticking upward like the national debt clock in Manhattan.
At 9:14 AM on a Tuesday, the counter read $312.47.
Jay did some mental math. Three engineers. Nine-fourteen in the morning. That was roughly five hours of agent activity since the overnight batch kicked off at four. Sixty-two dollars an hour. A dollar a minute.
He refreshed the page. $314.02.
By 10:30, when he came back from the coffee machine with a mug that said FORTE on it (left behind by a previous tenant of the office), the counter read $587.91. He stared at it. The number moved while he watched. $588.03. $588.17. $588.44.
The agents were working through a refactor of the Google Drive twin's permission model. It was a big job—the Drive twin had to replicate sharing semantics, viewer/editor/commenter roles, link-sharing modes, the whole labyrinth of Google's access control. Each agent iteration generated code, ran it against the scenario suite, analyzed the failures, and tried again. Each iteration consumed tokens. Lots of tokens.
At 11:47 AM, the counter crossed $1,000.
Jay walked over to Justin's desk. "We've burned a thousand dollars on tokens and it's not even lunch."
Justin looked up from his screen, where he was reviewing scenario definitions. (He didn't write code, but he wrote scenarios. That was allowed. Scenarios lived outside the codebase.) "Is the satisfaction metric going up?"
Jay checked. "It's at 0.84. It was 0.71 this morning."
"So we've bought thirteen points of satisfaction for a thousand dollars." Justin turned back to his screen. "That's about seventy-seven dollars per point. Seems reasonable."
"Seventy-seven dollars per—" Jay started, then stopped. He thought about what a human engineer cost. Salary, benefits, office space, equipment. The time it would take a team of humans to untangle Google Drive's permission model. Weeks, maybe. Months if they got it wrong the first time.
He looked at the counter. $1,023.56.
"It's still weird," he said.
"It's supposed to be weird," Justin said. "If it felt normal, we wouldn't be doing anything new."
Navan walked in holding a burrito the size of his forearm. "What are we staring at?"
"The token counter," Jay said.
Navan glanced at the dashboard. "$1,041. Nice." He took a bite of his burrito. "Is the Drive twin passing yet?"
"0.84 and climbing."
"Cool." He sat down, unwrapped the rest of his burrito, and opened his laptop. Within thirty seconds he was deep in scenario logs, burrito in one hand, trackpad under the other, apparently unbothered by the fact that his lunch cost roughly what the factory spent every four seconds.
"Seventy-seven dollars per point. Seems reasonable." Justin is the most terrifying kind of calm. Also the burrito detail at the end kills me. Navan is unbothered king.