Value per Token.
Not Cost
per Token.

Everyone's still discussing token cost.

A token has no fixed economic value. Its value depends on what it accomplishes - and who's using it.

Give the same AI agent and the same token budget to a Senior Engineer and a Junior Engineer, and you'll get different outcomes. Not because one is smarter, but because experience changes how tokens convert into value.

Senior Engineers frame problems faster. They recognize dead ends earlier. They know which answers to trust and which to question.

Junior Engineers do spend more tokens exploring. Yet that isn't waste. That's how judgment gets built - and it's the cheapest that education has ever been.

With that said, I simply don't believe tokens are a cost problem. This is a guidance problem.

The instinct, when the AI bill grows, is to ration: budgets per person, caps per team, dashboards that treat every token as a liability. That optimizes the easy number and punishes the exact behaviour you want most.

The highest-return investment isn't rationing AI per person or per team.

It's making your senior engineers exceptional at using it - and building a culture where they pass that judgment on.

Watch what happens when that culture takes hold:

Each one raises the value of future tokens used across the team. The budget didn't change. The conversion rate did.

That's leverage.