For decades, how expensive software was to produce is what kept software reviewable. Agents have removed that limit from every artifact at once, including the ones we invented to keep the previous ones in check.

In six months, "harness" has gone from internal jargon to the word that organises the whole sector. Behind the rebrand sits a number that is hard to ignore: the environment around the model explains more variance in the outcome than the model itself.

OpenAI shipped a service with no pricing page, staffed by its own engineers and a hand-picked list of integrators. Anthropic built almost the same thing through a different door. The question isn't whether the labs are going to compete with consulting firms anymore. It's which of those firms survive it.

GPT-Live finally listens like a person; too bad it still decides like a company. The voice really did get better, but the router that splits the work between a cheap model and an expensive one leaves developers with zero say in it.

A classic move that never dies: lower the price, then make the billable unit more expensive. Sonnet 5 does it with a new tokenizer, while almost catching up with Opus.

The outdated documentation that used to confuse interns now confuses agents too, only at a higher price. When context has a cost, clarity stops being only a technical virtue and becomes a way to save money.

The cloud felt infinite until someone actually read the invoice: the AI industry is leaving the age of subsidies behind and entering the age of the token meter. The shift toward pay-as-you-go pricing exposes the real cost of artificial intelligence and reopens uncomfortable questions about sustainability, dependence, and productivity.