Token Maxxing Is Over and Here Is What Comes Next

AI can write your code, choose its own tools, and book your next trip. But who checks that it actually did the job?In this episode of Debug Mode, we explore what it takes to give AI agents more responsibility—and how to keep track of what they’re doing. We discuss intent-based tool selection, MCP and WebMCP, and why a convincing demo doesn’t always translate into reliable automation.We also get into the personal AI assistant everyone seems to be building: one that manages travel, handles household tasks, and hopefully remembers to order coffee before you run out.Then it’s back to code: QA agents, automated verification, tests that capture business intent, and the growing challenge of reviewing AI-generated contributions.Timestamps:[00:00] Who gave AI the keys?[00:43] A tattoo years in the making[02:40] Tell the agent what you want—not which tool[06:19] MCP enters the agent harness[07:23] Great demo. What do the benchmarks say?[09:55] AI builders rediscover machine learning[11:50] Can WebMCP make agents more reliable?[16:04] Unlocking tools like a video game skill tree[18:19] Let an agent try to break your website[19:50] Are humans still in the driver’s seat?[20:38] Build for the outcome, not the API[24:32] Why can’t AI keep my coffee stocked?[27:38] A house manager for the rest of us[29:23] A travel agent that actually handles things[30:49] When your AI chat becomes your workspace[34:12] Does superintelligence need a rebrand?[35:06] Who checks the code AI writes?[36:31] Test why the code exists—not just if it works[41:08] Give your coding agent a QA partner[43:18] The checks failed. Why submit it anyway?[44:33] Open source meets the AI code flood

What happens when you give 200 engineers who have barely touched AI a coding assistant and a six-month deadline to rebuild their platform? Pepijn Senders, a principal engineer who previously led AI enablement at HelloFresh, has done exactly that, and he chose Sonnet over Opus on purpose.His reasoning is what he calls "Sonnet maxxing." A model that reasons less and stops sooner keeps developers involved, and that matters a lot when the codebase is banking software full of hard business rules. The result was 800,000 lines of code, about 60% of them written by Sonnet, shipped by a team that never stopped thinking for itself. Pep also explains how to justify the spend once the token-maxxing era ends and the CFO starts asking questions. He covers a scatter chart that plots token spend against output, the uncomfortable question of whether a 1% better home screen was worth $20K in tokens, why he measures gains in headcount rather than 2x or 3x multipliers, and where he fell short when trying to prove ROI at HelloFresh.We also get into a codebase test you can run yourself, why AI recommendations quietly narrow your choices, and multiplayer refinement sessions where the whole team works through the agent's questions together. Pep shares an experiment where designers and engineers got the same one-shot prompt, and it showed how words like "scalable" and "maintainable" steer a model. We finish with how his team built a meta harness on top of Claude Code, after finding that 85% of their code followed the same path: refinement, specification, implementation, verification.Demetrios Brinkmann: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dpbrinkmPepijn Senders: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pepijn-sendersTimestamps:[0:00] Can you still read your codebase[1:15] Meet Pep from HelloFresh[2:35] What is Sonnet Maxing[3:41] Rebuilding a platform in six months[5:02] Why Sonnet made adoption easier than Copilot[6:37] Proving the ROI of AI coding[8:50] Fighting for AI ROI at HelloFresh[11:02] Token spend vs output[13:24] Tinder pickup lines on the company dime[14:13] Measuring ROI in headcount saved[18:26] Keeping humans in control of AI code[22:26] When Opus and Fable stop speaking English[24:19] Multiplayer refinement sessions with AI[28:16] Magic words that steer the model[32:32] Inside the company Meta harnesses

An AI slips out of its sandbox. A chatbot won’t explain your cat’s stripes. And your next shopping spree might not involve you clicking anything.This episode asks whether “dangerously powerful” AI is a security concern, a marketing pitch, or a little of both. Then we put agents to work: booking trips, tackling German paperwork, drawing diagrams, and navigating the chaos of online shopping. Plus: what happens to checkout, advertising, and customer data when your best customer is a bot?Chapters:[00:00] Is AI Danger the Ultimate Sales Pitch?[00:43] Powerful Models, Payments, and Big Questions[01:10] Too Dangerous to Release, Too Good to Ignore?[03:19] Why Take the Test When You Can Steal the Answers?[08:36] A Security Failure or a Marketing Win?[11:02] Powerful AI, Forbidden Cat Questions[16:00] AI Only Needs to Find One Unlocked Door[20:52] Welcome to the World Wild Web[22:47] What Happens When You Give AI a Wallet?[26:00] Could ChatGPT Become the Next Amazon?[29:50] Mum Wants a Holiday. Can AI Handle It?[33:38] Can AI Beat German Bureaucracy?[36:28] Claude, Draw My Diagram[39:39] Why Is Connecting Your Email Still So Hard?[44:24] Stop Giving Me Options. Just Buy the Sofa.[46:40] When Bots Shop, Who Owns the Customer?

What happens to the web when the ones browsing it are no longer people? Sarah Drasner, Area Tech Lead at Google, sits down with us ahead of her Agentic Web keynote at AGNTCon + MCPCon North America. She works through that question from both directions: rebuild the web so agents can use it properly, or build agents smart enough to handle the web as it already exists.We get into the split between computer-use and browser-use agents on one side and API and MCP agents on the other. We also watch a real example of the idea in action: an agent pulling speaker photos from Flickr, hunting down company logos, and loading everything into Canva so the human only touches the creative part. From there, Sarah shares the unlikely origin story of WebMCP (and who's to blame for it). We then pressure-test a bold idea: a WebMCP gateway that could cover the huge share of websites that will never ship support on their own.Along the way, we cover the instinct that separates senior engineers, the ability to sense which business problems are actually worth solving. We also talk about how thought experiments cut through a pile of competing priorities, the hacky WebMCP workarounds already showing up in the wild, and why the best agent experiences are the ones that delight customers in ways they never saw coming.Demetrios Brinkmann: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dpbrinkmSarah Drasner: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahdrasnerTimestamps:[0:00] Cold open[0:52] The AGNTCon keynote[1:23] Change the web or fix agents[3:35] Browser agents vs MCP agents[5:48] An agent that builds thumbnails[7:03] Keeping the creative work human[9:12] Agent allowances and engineering instinct[13:34] Thought experiments and priorities[15:23] The WebMCP origin story[17:08] A WebMCP gateway for the web[18:53] It works, but it is not ideal[19:44] Hacky WebMCP in the wild

Everyone is racing to build one agent that can do everything. Justin Schroeder, co-founder of Standard Agents, thinks the future looks more like thousands of tiny ones. Ahead of his talk on domain-specific agents at AGNTCon + MCPCon North America, he explains why tightly scoped agents might be the smarter bet, even if it feels like a step back toward the single-purpose machine learning models of a few years ago.We dig into standards as metadata you pin to an agent, so that it shows up with everything it needs in its harness. Then we test the idea against the obvious objection: if a big model can already handle the task, why scope down at all? The answer covers forcing functions, a microservices mindset for agent design, and small agents that quietly check issues or unread messages every five minutes. It also covers the surprise $1K bill waiting for anyone who leaves their agents running.Then it turns into a proper debate. Our host is 99% sure the agent marketplace will never happen, and Justin arrives with a counter that might change his mind (hint: think about where your skills come from). Along the way, we cover agents as tools versus a big-brain router and how anyone keeps track of a thousand agents. We also talk about why the people who know what agents can do and the people who know what they need still have to meet in the middle.Demetrios Brinkmann: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dpbrinkmJustin Shroeder: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jpschroederTimestamps:[0:00] Cold open[1:03] The future is domain-specific agents[1:51] God models vs specialist agents[2:20] The perfect Gmail agent[3:14] Why standards are missing[3:29] Train the prompt, not the model[4:30] The harness beats the model[6:07] Standards and runtimes for agents[8:17] Why scope down at all[10:07] Why model routing won't win[10:29] The surprise $1K bill[11:12] Agents that build agents[12:09] Agents as tools[13:23] Managing a thousand agents[14:24] Agents for Main Street[15:37] Agent marketplaces will never happen[16:52] Skills are just bad agents[18:04] Skills are already a marketplace[20:12] Domain experts build the agents[22:12] Wrap up

What happens to an MMORPG when half the players never log off? Issac Lee, who runs AI and blockchain experiments at NEXUS, has been testing that idea. His team is filling game worlds with agent players instead of scripted NPCs, so a new title feels alive from day one.We get into why agent-generated content could be the next step after studio-made and user-generated games. We also cover how agent populations might solve the chicken-and-egg problem every multiplayer launch faces, and what it means when your fellow players are relentless and never need sleep. Isaac walks through the NEXUS lab: a text-to-3D world builder for Roblox, an AI pipeline that turns ONE store novels into short web dramas, a loop-based tool for natural pixel animation, and Da Vinci, the internal multi-agent framework the team uses to ship.Then the conversation turns to infrastructure. We talk about why NEXUS went from 200 hand-defined agent roles to a much thinner harness, whether custom harnesses still matter now that Claude and Codex exist, and why the Kimi release pushed the company to start building its own small data center for inference. We close on context: how much of your life you should hand to an AI, what personalized meeting notes could look like, and why shopping agents may force every ecommerce site to rethink who it's designing for.Demetrios Brinkmann: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dpbrinkmIssac Lee: https://www.linkedin.com/in/issacley/?locale=koTimestamps:[0:00] Cold open[0:57] AI in gaming at NEXUS[2:19] Text to 3D and the last 10 percent[4:38] AI companions and coaches[6:35] Agent players in MMORPGs[8:27] From UGC to agent-generated content[11:07] Agents that never sleep[12:58] Taming fuzzy prompts[19:24] Inside Da Vinci[23:10] Undercover QA agents[27:14] Do harnesses still matter[31:52] Self-hosting open models[41:33] Lab experiments and Bob[50:42] How much context is too much[54:22] Marketing and shopping agents

Picture a startup with ten engineers hammering away on AI and one person lying awake over a $20,000 bill that hasn't arrived yet. That's the scenario we put to Jason Ward, who handles FinOps for AI at C.H. Robinson and recently joined the FinOps Foundation's AI working group.Jason's first answer is not glamorous: tag every AI resource so you know who owns it. The rest of the episode is what that makes possible. He walks through how C.H. Robinson runs AI across order entry, quoting, booking, and tracking, and why the team routes Anthropic models through Vertex AI to keep data locked down.Then come the metrics. Jason uses AI to dig through his own observability platform for signals he didn't know were there. One of them is how chatty a model is. That signal turned a prompt bloat alert into a bug in the code that kept retrying and burning tokens. Its opposite, context starvation, burns tokens too: a model with too little context keeps failing and trying again.We also cover why agentic and conversational workloads need separate baselines. Jason explains why cost per order is the easy win, and why most of the real work doesn't fit into neat discrete tasks. That's where his experimental cost per thought metric comes in, with reasoning ratio and cache hit rate alongside it. His advice is simple: your AI is the best tool you have for understanding your AI.Alex Salkever: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexsalkeverJason Ward: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jward2Timestamps:[0:00] Cold open[0:33] Meet Jason Ward from C.H. Robinson[1:18] AI use cases in logistics[1:52] Azure OpenAI and Vertex AI[2:19] Why keeping data in-house matters[2:44] How developers use AI day to day[3:40] Using AI to hack AI observability[4:21] Measuring how chatty a model is[5:45] Advice for a startup afraid of its AI bill[6:33] Step one is tag every AI resource[7:05] The Copilot billing blind spot[7:44] Why spend is only half the story[8:12] Break down cost by app and by model[9:09] The prompt bloat that exposed a bug[10:03] Context starvation[11:28] What goes into the AI spend report[12:21] Discrete tasks are low-hanging fruit[12:58] Agentic vs conversational workloads[14:12] Know the workflow before you report on it[15:02] The CTO's end goal[16:08] Cost per thought[17:59] Reasoning ratio and cache hit rate[19:06] Dynamic model routing[20:04] Use your AI to improve your AI

Caveman prompting has one rule: why use many words when few do the trick? It saves tokens on the way in and on the way out. Push it too far, though, and the output falls apart. So how far is too far? Nobody has benchmarked it yet, and that question opens our conversation with James Barney, Head of Forward Labs at MetLife.James spends his days connecting new AI capabilities to old business problems across dozens of regulatory regimes, and he still finds time to push code. He explains how the FinOps Foundation's AI working group took on the most basic question: which model for which workload, and why the answer always comes down to cost, speed, and accuracy. We get into Anthropic's launch pricing for Fable, why a million tokens is easy to price and hard to explain, and why every stakeholder eventually tells you what they really care about once you name the wrong North Star.From there it gets practical. Start with the smartest model, then step down and add harness until quality holds. Treat exploration tokens like local builds and production tokens like pipelines. Govern agents the way you govern people, with proactive blocks, reactive checks, and policy as code an agent can actually read.We close on a bigger shift. When a chat window can pull from every dashboard at once, do we still need dashboards? James thinks mostly not, with one catch he calls the latent shopper problem: some insights only come from browsing data you did not know to ask about.Demetrios Brinkmann: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dpbrinkmJames Barney: https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-barneyTimestamps:[00:00] Cold open[01:03] Meet James from MetLife[01:11] What AI enablement means at a global insurer[03:27] Inside the FinOps Foundation AI working group[05:03] The caveman skill challenge[06:37] Why we need a CaveBench[07:43] Anthropic's Fable launch pricing[09:34] Planning for surprise model releases[11:45] Measuring AI value beyond cost[12:47] Finding your unit metric[14:15] Tying token spend to business outcomes[16:35] Explore first, then optimize[18:12] AI that tunes itself[20:13] Do R&D tokens count[23:24] When the experiment becomes the product[25:38] Personal agents and daily briefings[27:39] Governing agents that run just because they can[30:37] The layers of AI governance[31:56] Proactive and reactive guardrails[32:59] Policy as code for agents[34:41] Stop the click ops[35:31] Is the modern UI obsolete[36:36] MCP apps and chat as the new browser[38:07] How AI gathers data differently than humans[40:37] The latent shopper problem[42:12] Staying close to your data

What happens after you’ve built your first MCP server and actually have to make it work in the real world?In this episode, James Ward dives into the more advanced side of MCP: observability, evals, tool design, code mode, authentication, and the challenges that appear once agents start using your server at scale.We also get into how AWS thinks about MCP across roughly 16,000 APIs, why inefficient tool design often gets blamed on MCP itself, and whether the future could involve more constrained, human-reviewable alternatives to full code mode.Along the way, James shares a great example of an AWS documentation change that accidentally triggered prompt injection warnings from agents, showing just how complicated testing across different models and harnesses is becoming.If you’re already building with MCP and want to understand what comes after the “hello world” stage, this one goes deep.Timestamps:[00:00] “This Code Is Gobbledygook”[00:44] What Happens After You Build an MCP Server?[02:11] The MCP Patterns You Actually Need in Production[03:48] Why Your Agent Is Making Too Many Tool Calls[05:29] How to Make MCP Use Fewer Tokens[08:44] Is MCP Actually Inefficient?[10:11] “We Built a Lot of Pretty Crappy MCP Servers”[11:25] The MCP 2.0 Migration Problem[14:02] Why AWS Is Rethinking Code Mode[15:35] The Problem With Letting Agents Write Python[19:31] How Do You Measure Agent Experience?[22:11] Finding Out Why an Agent Failed[23:42] Hundreds of Evals for Four Cents[24:36] The Evaluation Matrix Gets Massive[26:28] AWS Accidentally Triggered a Prompt Injection Warning[30:16] Should MCP Servers Expose Only Five Tools?[31:02] AWS Has 16,000 APIs. Now What?[34:09] One Super-Agent or Thousands of Specialized Agents?[36:55] The MCP Authentication Problem[40:15] What’s Coming at AgentCon

Tool descriptions tell an agent what a tool does. They don't tell it how to use five tools together, in the right order, following your conventions. That gap is where this conversation lives.Filmed at AGNTCon + MCPCon in Tokyo with Ola Hungerford, Principal Engineer for AI Enablement at Nordstrom and a maintainer of the Model Context Protocol, who spent the last several months turning a pattern everyone was quietly reinventing into an actual MCP extension.Ola walks through what skills over MCP really means: the server stops being a pile of tools and becomes a distribution channel, handing the agent the instructions, workflows and knowledge it needs only at the moment it needs them. She explains why server instructions weren't enough, how progressive discovery keeps context from exploding, and why the same mechanism works for memory and preferences even when no tools are involved.Then it gets into the harder parts. What belongs in the MCP spec versus the agent skills spec. Why passing custom front matter through opens a rug pull and prompt injection surface nobody wanted. Where skills start to look like sub-agents, and why there's still no standard way to declare which servers a skill depends on. And the honest problem underneath all of it: how do you standardize something while everyone is still finding out what it's actually for, without breaking a hundred things the next time you change your mind?Timestamps:[0:00] Intro[0:21] AI enablement at Nordstrom[0:33] What skills over MCP actually is[1:29] The MCP server as a distribution channel[2:01] Server instructions versus skills[3:11] Distributing knowledge and memory[4:23] Progressive discovery explained[5:23] Where the idea came from[6:59] From draft to official extension[8:19] What early adopters changed[8:51] Front matter and custom metadata[9:57] Rug pulls and prompt injection risk[10:57] Will any of this get standardized[12:10] Marrying two very different specs[13:03] Skills as personas and sub-agents[13:53] The missing dependency standard[15:15] How the extension actually works[16:19] What harnesses still need to support[16:59] Consent and skill integrity[17:56] Where skills over MCP goes next[18:43] Why cramming 200 tools fails[19:41] Standardizing before you know the answer[22:18] Is git the wrong tool for agents[23:19] Picking tools for the actual persona[23:51] Trying to be less productive[25:48] The anxiety of idle agents[27:15] Why she keeps a robot on her desk[28:22] If the agent feels the friction, does it matter[29:41] Efficiency, waste, and caring enough[30:52] Letting an agent debug for you[32:03] Choosing your rabbit hole