Lately I've been thinking about tokens as a lever for who gets to build the future. Alan Kay had a great line: you can live 10 to 15 years ahead if you're willing to pay 10 to 20x for it. At Xerox PARC, he and other researchers had personal computers a decade before anyone else, and unlimited tokens are the modern equivalent of that.

Though with how fast technology diffuses now, I'd say it's more like 3 to 5 years in the future rather than 10 to 15. And it's under appreciated how much a pile of unlimited tokens draws top-tier talent.

Where this really shows up for me is in design work. For a decade, the complexity of front-end development made it impractical for most designers to code. But AI coding agents are now collapsing the gap between designing and building. The loop has flipped: it used to be faster to mock up software than to ship it, and now designers can work iteratively with production code, not just prototypes.

So the tokens aren't just about speed. They're about getting back into the medium instead of working a level or two abstracted away. That's what makes better designers, and it's a bigger deal than the price tag suggests.