I think also the demand for software tokens is going to be bursty, and many things are going to be one-time software ports.

- Nervous about Redis being written in C? Switch to Garnet.

- Bun ported from Zig to Rust for $165,000 at API pricing -> https://bun.com/blog/bun-in-rust

- Microsoft ports Copilot runtime to Rust for $120,000 in API costs without blocking other development work -> https://github.blog/ai-and-ml/generative-ai/migrating-the-gi...

- Someone made a "clean room port" of Total Annihilation in golang, looks like it started in August and is now the most convenient way to play Total Annihilation. https://github.com/nanolathe-gg/nanolathe

- You only have to decompile / reverse engineer an existing game once and now you can have an agent occasionally add features.

Once you do the port and have worked out the regression issues, assuming you are switching to a safer language with better guarantees, you are now off of the old codebase and don't have to pay the costs of the old codebase. It's just a one time burst of token usage.

Costs of tokens will continue to fall as more hardware either becomes rentable (datacenter comes online) or moves into the used market, as workloads move onto users individual machine (because smaller models are becoming more capable and getting better inference engines and harnesses).

You can also task an agent with researching for "list the top 5 performance improvements we might be able to make" and have it research overnight, then the next day start a fleet of agents iterating through the findings that seem the most workable . Once you gain the performance win, that's basically permanent.

I think that token usage is a very elastic market, you can choose to spin up a fleet of agents or... you can stay human-in-the-loop, or you can type code yourself if you don't have a token budget.

So, yeah, I don't think Anthropic or OpenAI are worth much when hot on their heels are open-weight models hosted by major cloud providers + Nvidia and cloud providers themselves building their own models.