Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is now warning against "token-maxing," the uncritical use of the most powerful AI models for every task. "The hard truth is that the marginal cost of productivity improvement has to match the marginal cost of the token," Nadella says in an interview. Frontier models shouldn't be wasted on everyday problems. Pure token-maxing won't lead to real economic growth, he argues, even as he admits, "I'm like a token-maxer too. So it is addictive."
Despite the warning, Nadella has a sweeping vision for programming that will burn plenty of tokens itself: developers won't write code anymore. Instead, they'll oversee hundreds or thousands of AI agents. He calls this new core skill "cognitive coverage:" deeply understanding code that agents wrote. "I have a repo full of code written by agents. I'm cognitively understanding what happened." That still requires a computer science education, he says, but the work itself will change in a big way.
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