TOKENS OVER HIRES

Summary from the TLDR Founders newsletter

Some startups now buy engineering in tokens instead of headcount. Two founders spend about $28,000 a year on AI, less than one engineer costs. In their first month, they merged 657 pull requests. Their biggest bill is about $1,500 a month for an AI code reviewer, so neither founder has to read every first draft. Their real limit is attention. While one founder was reviewing other work, a small database problem grew until it took the product down. So their next engineer will own one piece of the product, agents included.