Token Anxiety

Scenes from San Francisco, February 2026

A friend left a party at 9:30 on a Saturday. Not tired. Not sick. He wanted to get back to his agents.

Nobody questions it anymore. Half the room is thinking the same thing. The other half are probably checking the progress of their agents. At a party.

All the parties are sober now. Young people don’t drink because they’re going back to work after. Not inspired by Bryan Johnson, although that’s probably a factor. The buzz they want now runs on tokens per day.

I keep noticing it on walks through the Mission. Laptops glowing everywhere. Cafes, sidewalks, heck even park benches. People walking with screens open like a flashlight guiding them somewhere. Less drunk laughter on the streets these days. More keystrokes.

Dinner conversations used to start with “what are you building?” That’s over. Now it’s “how many agents do you have running?” People drop the number the way they used to drop their follower count. Quietly competitive. The flex isn’t what you’ve accomplished anymore. It’s what’s working while you’re sitting here not working.

The vocabulary is what really gets me though. People describe models the way sommeliers describe wine. This one has better taste. That one hallucinates with more confidence. Opus is bold, Codex is smooth. They talk about harnesses and reins like they’re controlling horses. Invisible whips directing invisible labor. Someone at a dinner said they keep “Claude on a tight leash for code review but give it more slack for creative work.” We’ve started borrowing the language of how we treat animals for something none of us actually understand yet.

Waking up and checking what your agents produced overnight is the first thing now. Before coffee. Before texts. You open your laptop and grade homework you assigned in your sleep. Some of it is good. Most needs rework. But you start shipping a plan before you sleep just so you can wake up to more code written overnight. Saturdays became uninterrupted build windows. No meetings, no Slack, twelve hours of you and your agents. Sunday morning X is all terminal screenshots and shipping receipts. “What’d you ship this weekend?” replaced “what’d you do this weekend?”

The anxiety is rational, which is why it sticks. Every week some new benchmark drops that makes last month’s workflow feel prehistoric. Codex ships overnight processing. Opus gets faster. Context windows double. None of it reduces the pressure. It multiplies it. You can do more now. And someone already is. The window to be first at anything feels like it’s shrinking by the day. Literally, by the day.

I replaced Netflix with Claude Code. I lie in bed thinking about what I can spin up before I fall asleep, what can run while I’m unconscious. Reading a novel feels indulgent now. Watching a movie without a laptop open feels wasteful. This voice in my head that says “something could be running right now” just doesn’t shut off. I’m not even building a company. I’m just addicted to building my random ideas.

Everyone here knows they should step away more. That’s not the problem. The problem is what your brain does when you try. I still take aimless walks. The agents come with me now.