This is a 21st-century equivalent of leaving short words ("of", "the", "in") out of telegrams because telegraph operators charged by the word. That caused plenty of problems in comprehension… this is probably much worse because it's being applied to extremely complex and highly structured messages.

It seems like a short-sighted solution to a problem that is either transient or negligible in the long run. "Make code nearly unreadable to deal with inefficient tokenization and/or a weird cost model for LLMs."

I strongly question the idea that code can be effectively audited by humans if it can't be read by humans.