Coder to Conductor · Research Paper

05 The Token Economy

Published 25 May 2026 PDF 1 resource
The first four papers assumed the engineering transformation will happen. This one asks whether organisations can afford it. The seat-based licensing model that finance departments have used for thirty years is decoration if you ignore the fuel: tokens. The paper exposes the "seat trap" — treating Cursor or Copilot as $20-per-developer SaaS while ignoring inference costs that arrive months later as a shock — and argues that the ROI of agentic engineering is real, but only for organisations that deliberately redesign their budgeting frameworks around variable computational cost.

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The Paper

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