An Intern Burned 100 Million Tokens in a Day. They Weren’t Fired. They Were Right.
When an intern burns 100 million tokens to write 15 lines of code, management panics. But measuring AI coding ROI by ‘cost per line’ is a fundamentally broken metric. The real cost isn’t code generation—it’s the AI re-reading context and looping through trial and error. Here’s why your token budget caps are killing productivity.