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Article opening feedback: Token Math

Review the headline, deck, and opening paragraph for readers of Every, an AI-focused publication. Identify the strongest idea, assess the framing and wording, and give concise editorial feedback with suggested replacement copy where useful. Use the rest of the draft as context. Preserve the factual qualifications.
Use Every’s house style: headlines should express the most interesting or surprising claim in concise, punchy language that mostly fits an email subject line. Let the dek develop the headline with a clear implication or detail. Headlines can be bold, with qualifications developed in the body. The first sentence should be strong and catchy, and continue naturally from the hed/dek. Any problems you find you should explain and offer alternatives.
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Headline selection captured in the source

HED: Token Math
Alt Hed: How Many Tokens are Too Many?

DEK: What’s the ROI on experimentation?
Alt DEK: When expensive experimentation is worth it and when to rein your tokenmaxxing in.

Opening paragraph

Often if you are the highest spender at your company you might think about reining yourself in. But when it comes to tokens, Every CEO Dan Shipper thinks everyone else should consider ramping up. He consumes more than three times as many tokens as the next-highest user at the company. The size of the gap has him wondering whether the rest of us are being ambitious enough with AI.

Full draft without comments

HED: Token Math
DEK: What’s the ROI on experimentation?

Often if you are the highest spender at your company you might think about reining yourself in. But when it comes to tokens, Every CEO Dan Shipper thinks everyone else should consider ramping up. He consumes more than three times as many tokens as the next-highest user at the company. The size of the gap has him wondering whether the rest of us are being ambitious enough with AI.

Every’s OpenAI token leaderboard (Screenshot courtesy of Laura Entis.)

The goal isn't tokenmaxxing, or the practice of torching tokens for sport. Instead, he wants to give people room to experiment with radical new strategies and ways of working that, should they pan out, could vastly improve their productivity and more than justify the token costs.

In a conversation with head of platform Willie Williams, the two settled on a tangible starting point: use AI to attack the engineering team’s bottlenecks, see how far they get, and only then do the token math.

Inside Every

Token budgets at the frontier

Dan’s encouragement to experiment comes with an expectation: When people spend company money, they should assess what that spending produced and whether they could be more efficient next time.

Turning that philosophy into spending decisions falls to head of operations Arielle Shipper. For now, she evaluates expensive runs case by case, using the results to decide when to keep funding the work and when to change course.

Her early-warning system is the company card. She keeps the ChatGPT automatic credit refill relatively low, so an unusually rapid succession of charges tells her that someone is building or testing something big.

When she’s alerted to changes over the set amount Arielle typically asks the team on Slack if anyone is in the middle of a particularly big run or check the usage leaderboard and message the people at the top. “Then Dan always responds, ‘It’s me running Ultra.’” she says, which explains why he’s always on the top of the leaderboard.

A common occurrence. (Screenshot courtesy of Laura Entis.)

She wants answers to three questions: What did the run cost? What did it buy us? And what did we learn?

The team has started offering these retrospectives unprompted. After a string of Astra experiments racked up billions of tokens, head of video Randy Counsman messaged her detailing what had worked, what hadn’t, and what he’d learned—which, it turns out, was a lot.

More on that below.

Data point

4.5 billion

That’s how many OpenAI tokens Randy burned through in an attempt to make a 3D model of his face with Astra.

The project started innocently enough: Inspired by social media posts of impressive-looking AI-generated demos made with Blender, a free 3D tool, he wanted to try it himself. Experimenting with AI, after all, is an important component of his job.

Using strategies shared on X, he set up an orchestrator agent to maintain the plan, an implementer to assign tasks, and subagents to execute them, and instructed Codex to keep looping through improvements until the model was “implemented very well,” Randy says. In retrospect, “It was an ambiguous goal.”

Then he let the model run. And run. And run.

By the time he pressed pause on the project, the token spend was in the billions and the result was, as he puts it, “very janky.”

The output, rendered in four different shaders. (Image courtesy of Randy Counsman.)

An AI audit of his Codex sessions revealed some glaring inefficiencies: Layers of agents passed growing amounts of context back and forth, including messages checking whether a subagent had completed a task. He’d unwittingly created a compute-hungry “unruly swarm” of agents.

Randy has since rebuilt his project setup. He dropped the implementer, caped the orchestrator at five Sol subagents to control costs, and built in explicit feedback checkpoints. For a recent project, he also generated an image of the design he wanted, so a judge agent could check the model's work against a concrete target instead of an open-ended instruction to keep improving.

A failed experiment is still a good investment if it shows where an AI system falls short. Randy now has a benchmark to run new models against—how well they turn an organic 2D image into an organic 3D model—and a leaner setup to get a better result with fewer tokens.

Unwittingly large token spends via experimentation is an Every rite of passage. (Screenshot courtesy of Laura Entis.)
Try it yourself: Pick an AI task that burned through more tokens than expected and paste the following into your agent of choice:
Review the available session history and token usage records for [task/project] during [date range], including any subagent sessions.
I was trying to [goal]. The result was [what happened]. Help me understand where the tokens went and what I could do differently next time.

• Break down usage by activity and model where the records allow.
• Look for repeated work, unnecessary status checks, and large amounts of context passed between agents. Show specific examples.
• Distinguish necessary work from likely waste. Don’t assume high usage or cached input was wasteful.
• Recommend the three most useful changes to my instructions, model choices, or agent setup.
  If you can’t access the records you need, tell me what to provide.

Steal this workflow

Don’t send Fable to do a Sonnet’s job

Spiral general manager Marcus Moretti’s token spend strategy is straightforward: Stay within the weekly usage limits for his Claude Code Max plan.

It’s a simple goal that requires active management; Marcus is selective about which assignments go to Fable 5.1 and which go to a cheaper model.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

Step 1. Learn what each model is good at. Marcus has used Anthropic's models long enough to know on sight whether a job needs Sonnet, Opus, or Fable-level intelligence.

Step 2. Match the model to the assignment. Basic tasks—analytics checks, for example—go to Sonnet. Work with a clear objective, such as a tightly scoped product change, goes to Opus. For a larger feature—like the new billing implementation he’s working on—Marcus uses Fable 5.1 to develop the specification: what needs to be built and how it should work.

Step 3. For complex work, let the model delegate. Once the plan is ready, Marcus tells Fable, “Kick this off, and for all coding tasks, use your judgment about delegating to a lower model.” Fable assigns pieces to Opus and Sonnet, then checks their work. This lets the strongest model manage the project without executing every task.

Try it this week: Choose a recurring task and run it with a cheaper model than you usually use. Check whether the result meets your needs before making it your default for that task.

The daily driver
The models the team is using this week:

• Douglas Brundage, head of marketing: Using Fable 5.1 more for visual work, plus Grok Bot to monitor social media and build a tool for visuals.
• Randy Counsman, head of video: Astra (high) for complex work and medium for basic tasks; Sol (extra high) for voice mode orchestration, where Astra feels too slow and heavy-handed. Fable for code-related planning and Opus when he runs out of Astra tokens.
• Kieran Klaassen, Cora general manager: Fable 5.1 (extra high, 1M context) for coding and knowledge work, switching to Astra for some research and writing.
• Tyler Nishida, design engineer: Fable 5.1 (high) as the coordinator/orchestrator for projects in Cursor, with Grok 4.6 (extra high) subagents. Astra (ultra) for personal projects. “It’s not a model, but Cursor projects are amazing as a daily driver for your preferred models. My sidebar is so clean, and it's so much easier to manage work.”

Tyler’s Cursor setup. (Image courtesy of Tyler Nishida.)

• Katie Parrott, staff writer: “The Astra fever has broken for me,” she says. These days, she’s back to Sol (high) for task management and has switched to Claude models for writing because she finds Sol and Astra “too flat—they just report the facts instead of shaping a narrative that brings the reader along.”
• Natalia Quintero, head of consulting: Astra (medium).
• Yash Poojary, growth engineer: Astra (high) and Fable 5.1.
• Arielle Shipper, head of operations: Sol (medium). “Sol forever. SOLoyalist,” she says.
• Loren Stewart, engineer: Downgraded from Astra to Sol (medium) for coding to reduce costs and finds the switch is working well. Fable 5.1 “remains the champion thought partner.”