What bothers me about this whole AI tokenomics situation is the lack of transparency. OpenAI and Anthropic have to perhaps be the most opaque companies in existence wrt their offerings. There's like a thousand variables that they can change on the backend at the push of a button which can wildly swing API spends within the same model (partly also due to the non-deterministic nature of LxMs, but still), and there's no objective way to measure them other than vibes.

When the regulations do arrive, I think they should really focus on AI companies and API providers being more transparent wrt how they're billing their customers. Because right now, it's a totally vibes-dependent and a mess.

> Subagents are like trading derivatives. You can lose as much as you want.

Excellent pithy warning.

Sadly this is true - for individual folks on the lower end of the spend spectrum.

But there’s a point on that spectrum where the ability to run multiple experiments in parallel, even with a significant amount of (one time) wastage, is overall more cost effective than the alternative.

Afaik there is just pay-as-use with Deepseek

Why use subagents at all