In a sense, everyone is a startup now... At least, every serious user of agents.

So... if you spend $3m to replace a $1m team... you are betting on that $3m cost coming down. It's a proof of concept. The first step is to find out if agents can do the job at all. At this point you are hoping future versions will get more efficient.

Trying to make something efficient before you know that it is even possible is hard.

Drop-in, profitable on day-1 isn't what the frontier looks like.

If we want to be like everyone else then yes it's true. However that business may or may not survive when token costs go up (or is fashionable to say now, "rug pull"). If you can be token efficient now, the path to profitability is much clearer.

There's already many things that can be done now to bring down token use. Better planning, tests, Language severs, MCP compression. Don't use claw, teams, swarms, Ralph loop, scheduled tasks unless there is a clear use case.

Almost everyone needs a worker-owned co-op to capture more of the value they create.