A coding agent can edit one function beautifully.
But ask it a global question — "what breaks if I change this?", "can this write run without the tenant check?", "is this migration destructive?" — and it often starts guessing.
For a while, I thought the answer was better token efficiency. Now I think the deeper question is: what facts do you hand the agent in the first place?
I recently wrote on Medium that token spend only becomes an asset when you redesign the work around it — verification, context, workflow — rather than just buying more of it.
This post is the engineering side of that argument. Since then I've been hunting for token-efficient tooling, and writing my own when nothing fits. What follows is the piece I find most leverageable: making each token buy a verified fact instead of a guess. (Just where my own tinkering has led — not advice.)
