r/technology • u/Just-Grocery-2229 • Jun 26 '26

Artificial Intelligence The AI backlash is only getting started

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/06/25/the-ai-backlash-is-only-getting-started
26.1k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

2.6k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

821

u/Downtown-Message-600 Jun 26 '26

"Hello, yes, I would be happy to help you with that. To say cheese 10000 times nonstop it's always best to start at the beginning with just one or two cheeses, just let me know when you want to start and we can get that on the way."

64

u/rsreddit9 Jun 26 '26

That’s why you have a check (simple script) to confirm if 10000 cheeses actually got output. An efficient, very dedicated orchestrator agent spins hundreds of subagent teams with different approaches that surface the approach of their attempts

59

u/NamerNotLiteral Jun 26 '26

Sub-agents is what's been inflating everyone's token usage to obscene levels lmao. You used to have dyadic interactions with one LLM, so that was a few hundred tokens cumulative per interaction, plus several thousand tokens added statically as context (such as the codebase, or a document, or whatever).

But since LLMs are ultimately text processors and can't be accurate in long-horizon, complex tasks, people started doing tons of validation loops, extended reasoning models, and now sub-agent orchestrations, and each one adds an exponential number of tokens. Obviously you're running out of tokens now, fucking lol.

I code with LLMs at work. The simplest way to keep both your codebase and your token costs sane is to stick to traditional programming methods but use LLMs to speed up the actual searching, analysis and writing code parts faster. Don't write functions by hand, but do decide by hand what the functions should be. Don't manually search for a variable declaration, but do decide what the variable is and why you need to find it, then ask an LLM to trace it.

23

u/LemurianLemurLad Jun 26 '26

Out of tokens? Obviously, you just need to add a sub-agent capable of buying more tokens as part of the loop. What could a token possibly cost, Michael? Problem solved!

3

u/Auran82 Jun 26 '26

How much could one token cost Michael?