I've spent 30 years in operations management … call centers, workforce management, content moderation at scale (20K agents, 200 countries). Now I'm building AI orchestration tooling.
I almost fell for the token-burn metric myself. I'm between roles, and I caught myself thinking: if I can demonstrate high token spend, maybe that's my ticket to a big-salary AI engineering role.
Then I realized I was about to abandon everything I'd learned about measuring outcome instead of effort.
The Three Currencies framework (CLOCK, COIN, CARBON) and IRE fidelity come from that operations background. Happy to discuss, push back welcome.