The Caveman Prompting Challenge

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

Two people, a wrong turn into a back alley, a community garden, and about thirty minutes of arguing about protocols on the streets of Tokyo.The guest is Angie Jones, VP of Developer Experience at the Agentic AI Foundation, fresh off launching AGNTCon + MCPCon in China before the Tokyo stop. She opens with what she learned there: a mobile-first, super-app world where the integration problem most of us obsess over barely exists, where every conversation about agents is really a conversation about the model, and where companies are now reaching for MCP and A2A precisely because they want to operate outside that ecosystem.The bulk of it is WebMCP - a protocol with a confusing name and, until recently, almost no attention. The pitch: put tool calling in the page itself, so your agent works inside your logged-in session with only the tools relevant to the page you're on, instead of screenshotting an anonymous browser and burning tokens guessing at the accessibility tree. Angie explains why it went from ignored to urgent the moment agentic browsing got good, and why the fix for computer use being slow and hijacking your machine might be a standard rather than a better model.It closes on agent-to-agent: whether anyone actually wants a marketplace of thousands of agents, or whether the real value is the one agent that has access you'll never get. Plus a well-earned complaint about three-letter acronyms and why researchers are still the only people naming things well.Timestamps:[0:00] Intro[0:59] Launching the conference in China[1:34] What North America gets wrong about agents[2:23] Super apps versus endless integrations[3:14] What happens when they expand beyond China[3:39] Tencent and A2A in production[4:34] A model-first country[5:56] Chinese coding agents and harnesses[6:59] Tokyo and the conference world tour[7:26] What WebMCP actually is[8:56] Why it has nothing to do with MCP[9:20] Page-level tools and your logged-in session[10:36] Why WebMCP sat unnoticed for months[11:25] Token efficiency and reliability[12:23] The moment computer use got good[13:15] Two real grievances with computer use[14:06] Collaborating instead of surrendering your screen[15:24] A short detour into Tokyo signage[16:15] Why web developers should be excited[17:04] Agents and the loss of first-party data[18:27] Why an agent cannot just buy something[19:23] Inside the agentic commerce working group[20:18] Upsells recommenders and an agent that ignores them[23:27] The commerce protocols to watch[24:19] Why A2A is next[25:31] Publishing your agent as a service[27:13] The case against agent marketplaces[27:55] Why access beats capability[29:31] Google's protocol land grab[30:45] Bring back the cool names[31:39] Amsterdam, San Jose, and what comes next

A year ago, Palo Alto Networks built dashboards to track AI spend. Today those dashboards are useless, and the team that built them thinks that's the whole story.Recorded at FinOps X in San Diego, this conversation brings together Abhinav Lad, who leads cloud and AI finance at Palo Alto Networks, and Kuntal Patel, who runs the cloud engineering function behind it. They explain what happened when agents entered the picture, and AI stopped behaving like a service anyone could forecast.The short version: consumption went from linear to exponential almost overnight. Agents are goal-oriented rather than task-oriented, so they plan, call tools, verify, fail, retry, and keep looping until they hit the outcome, and every iteration is billable. So how do you run finance on top of that? Abhinav and Kuntal walk through the metrics that replaced their old forecasts: adoption rate, cost per user, AI as a percentage of revenue - and the budget limits that let engineering leaders choose between the newest model and a longer runway. They get into the open question of whether a cheaper model saves money or just burns more tokens thinking. They explain why an AI gateway became the control plane for cost and security at the same time, why retry caps belong in the design phase instead of the postmortem, and how FinOps starts to resemble product QA once the bill becomes the clearest signal that something is broken.They close on a warning worth sitting with: cost per million tokens is a number that means almost nothing on its own, and a value story built on it will point you somewhere you don't want to go.Palo Alto Networks: https://www.paloaltonetworks.comAbhinav Lad: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abhinav-ladKuntal Patel: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kuntalpatel35Alex Salkever: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexsalkeverTimestamps:[0:00] Intro[1:00] Who runs FinOps for AI at Palo Alto Networks[2:10] Last year's AI dashboards are already useless[4:26] Agents turned linear forecasts exponential[7:27] Three traits that make agents expensive[8:34] The hidden bill: RAG, vectors and egress[9:16] Cost per user and adoption rate[11:21] Giving engineering leaders a budget[12:07] Using DORA metrics to prove value[13:53] Where DORA stops fitting AI[16:20] Does the cheaper model actually save money[17:57] Why you need an AI gateway[20:05] Inside Prisma AIRS[21:00] Three cost models for three use cases[22:52] Forecasting lessons from Electronic Arts[24:03] Runaway agents and endless loops[25:59] Capping retries before they burn cash[28:06] Writing cost policy at design time[29:01] When FinOps becomes product QA[32:17] Explaining AI spend to the C-suite[34:51] Valuing AI beyond engineering[37:04] Crawl, walk, run: where they are today[38:20] Why cost per million tokens is meaningless[39:26] Closing thoughts

In this episode of Agentic Conversations, we sit down with Ambud Sharma, Principal Engineer at Pinterest, responsible for general technology efficiency, fresh off delivering a controversial keynote on AI infrastructure optimization at scale.Ambud walks us through his Five Layer Cake framework - a structured approach to driving efficiency across every level of the AI stack, from silicon and hardware procurement to model selection, inference engine design, and governance. We explore how decisions compound across layers to unlock real business growth, and how the wrong choices can lock you into expensive commitments for years.We stress test the framework against two very different business models: what the stack looks like if you are building the next Cursor, and how it changes entirely if you are building the next YouTube. Along the way we cover hardware immutability, inference engine warm-up costs, GPU occupancy, context switching, quantization trade-offs, model routing, and why experimentation discipline is the only thing that keeps AI infrastructure costs from getting out of control.We also look at how this framework holds up in the emerging agent era, what changes when agent-to-agent communication becomes the norm, and why agent traffic just passed bot traffic on Cloudflare. The conversation closes on a deceptively simple takeaway: there is no silver bullet, and experimentation at every layer always comes first.Pinterest: https://about.pinterest.com/Alex Salkever: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexsalkeverAmbud Sharma: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ambudTimestamps:[0:00] Introduction and the controversial keynote[2:09] The five-layer cake explained[4:30] Why hardware decisions are irreversible[6:47] Two business models: building Cursor vs YouTube[10:42] Applying the five layers to a YouTube-style company[14:23] Experimentation as the core efficiency method[17:09] Inference stack: context switching and warm-up costs[20:07] Model layer: why changing models breaks everything[24:10] When you should not use an LLM at all[26:41] Governance and routing: right model for the right task[29:20] Horror stories of unchecked token spend[31:37] Experimentation discipline without stifling innovation[34:35] How the five layers change in the agent era[36:05] Agent-to-agent communication and governance complexity[38:27] Core takeaway: experimentation first at every layer

AI models are starting to act like appliances, locked into one narrow way of working, instead of the flexible infrastructure they used to be. Drew Breunig, an AI and data strategist working with the Overture Maps Foundation, joins us to explain why, and what it means for anyone building something that doesn't look like Claude Code.Drew walks through his "Winchester Mystery House" idea: what happens once code gets so cheap to write that the only real bottleneck left is feedback. From there we dig into DSPy: signatures, the GEPA optimizer, and the brand-new Flex optimizer, which rewrites your code instead of just your prompt, complete with a real before-and-after on cost and accuracy. We also get into why so many AI-built apps and websites end up looking identical, the actual difference between an agent and a workflow, what Drew learned a year after shipping a code library with no code in it, and why he thinks the most valuable thing you can do right now is close the laptop and go talk to people.CMPND: https://www.cmpnd.aiDrew Breunig: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drewbreunig/Demetrios: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dpbrinkmTimestamps:[0:00] Cold open: when Claude Code tries to call itself[1:19] Biggest AI news: labs trading diversity for reliability[2:35] How harnesses get trained into models over time[5:41] The problem: your harness starts fighting the model[9:13] When do you need your own harness?[10:02] The Winchester Mystery House warning[16:13] The blank page problem: why everything looks the same[20:50] Infrastructure vs appliances: the thesis lands[22:40] Current tool loadout: GLM, Kimi, Claude Code, Pi[27:04] The Raspberry Pi personal agent running on Slack[31:00] Crystallizing tasks: when to replace AI with pure code[33:10] DSPy explained: separating what from how[35:23] How prompt optimizers actually work[39:31] DSPy pre-dates ChatGPT: model-agnostic programs[44:00] Why you still need to ship the code, not just the spec[50:00] Don't plan more than a month ahead anymore[54:00] Coaching agents all day feels productive — it isn't[57:58] The dopamine of building with agents vs. why you still need human feedback

Every engineer at Wayfair can now see, in real time, exactly what their code costs, and that's on purpose. Brent Eubanks, FinOps Architect at Wayfair, walks us through what happens when you stop treating AI spend as a finance problem and start treating it as an engineering one.The story that sticks with you: a team was burning $400k a month on an LLM-driven workflow, until they flipped the whole thing on its head - hard-coded logic doing the heavy lifting, AI called in only when it's actually needed. New spend: $80k. It's the kind of move that only makes sense once you realize more agentic autonomy isn't always the win it's sold as.From there we get into the machinery Wayfair has built to make cost ownership feel less like a punishment and more like a superpower: guardrails baked straight into coding copilots, predictive alerts that catch a team blowing its budget before the month even ends, a "spend captain" system that pushes budget decisions down to the people closest to the work, and a genuinely strange new question every tech leader is starting to ask: if you were staffing a company with a team of AI agents instead of people, what would that org chart even look like?Wayfair: https://www.wayfair.comBrent Eubanks: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brenteubanksDemetrios: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dpbrinkmTimestamps:[00:00] Intro & teaser [01:14] Meet Brent (FinOps Architect, Wayfair) [02:34] Making AI adoption easy for developers [03:30] Three-area cost governance framework [04:45] Automated FinOps guardrails in pull requests [07:29] Predictive analytics: 400% over budget warnings [08:26] The 400% spender: asset or liability? [10:06] The "spend captain" model [12:13] The goal: 1000x more token use in two years [13:05] The thought experiment [15:08] The $400k workflow rebuilt for $80k [16:42] Hardcoded first, LLM as fallback [19:49] Engineers now own their full cost stack [20:13] The FinOps companion that works overnight [24:10] Guardrails injected before the pull request [26:17] Recurring tasks become automated skills [27:46] Sankey diagram: cost per agent step in real time [28:40] "The bill didn't blow up - that doesn't happen by accident"

OpenAI's Codex developer experience lead sits down with a former comedian turned ML engineering lead for a conversation about what happens when computer use agents stop being a novelty and start actually running your day.The conversation moves through building an AI-powered morning brief that reads every email, Slack message, and tweet before you've even opened your laptop, letting pinned threads check in on themselves every 30 minutes, and a skills system built to mirror how a person actually writes and reviews code. There's a close look at the guardrails and permission layers that keep an autonomous agent from pushing to the wrong repo or replying to the wrong tweet, how a codebase merging thousands of pull requests a day survives thanks to self-healing review before anything hits CI, and the idea of AI deference - when an agent should push through a task alone versus stop and ask for help. The back half gets personal: why developing taste and vocabulary now matters more than working harder, what it actually takes to delegate to an agent the way you'd onboard a new employee, and why this might be the year voice-orchestrated computer use finally makes everyone feel like they're talking to Jarvis.OpenAI: https://openai.comMonaco: https://www.monaco.comJason Liu: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jxnlcoMihail Eric: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mihailericDemetrios: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dpbrinkmTimestamps:[00:00] Intro and guest backgrounds[01:36] Why computer use beats plain API calls [09:11] Building an AI-powered morning brief [10:17] Self-monitoring threads that check in on their own [18:26] How OpenAI reviews thousands of PRs a day [19:42] Self-healing pull requests before CI even runs [23:07] Building review skills from teammates' habits [30:52] Why hard work stops being the differentiator [35:03] Introducing the idea of AI deference [42:44] Learning to delegate like hiring your first assistant [46:22] Why voice beats typing for giving agents context [50:56] The Tony Stark Jarvis analogy for this year

In this episode, we're joined by Josh Collier, FinOps Lead at Superhuman (formerly Grammarly), to explore what it really costs to run AI at scale and why the rules of the game changed faster than anyone expected.We discuss how AI token costs dropped 80% in two years, why that trend has sharply reversed with frontier models doubling in price, and how Josh rebuilt a single LLM workflow that cost $400k a month down to $80k by rethinking the architecture. He also shares how a cost calculator built in 15 minutes transformed the way his team estimates spend before running experiments, and why research-led optimization is the only kind that works without degrading the product.Along the way, we cover hidden costs most teams miss, the trade-off between Azure reserved capacity and OpenAI Priority Processing, why fixed subscription pricing is broken in an AI-native world, vendor lock-in risk, and what OpenAI's Guaranteed Capacity announcement really signals about where vendor relationships are heading next.Superhuman: https://superhuman.comJosh Collier: https://www.linkedin.com/in/josh-collier-945b7029/Demetrios: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dpbrinkmTimestamps:[00:00] OpenAI Guaranteed Capacity: what's really going on[01:04] Josh's path into AI FinOps[02:48] Token costs: the 80% price drop[04:16] Why costs will only go up[05:06] External LLMs as financial risk[07:16] Why subscription pricing is dead[08:22] The data residency fee nobody notices[09:33] The cost calculator built in 15 minutes[10:24] How it changed dev team speed[13:00] Tracking costs by service and team[15:33] $400k workflow rebuilt for $80k[17:13] Why only research can optimize tokens[20:00] Speculative decoding win[23:11] One bad query, $40k gone[26:00] Why Azure PTU was exhausting[28:59] Shadow traffic load testing[29:07] Priority processing: no brainer[31:10] Guaranteed capacity: lock-in signal?[32:18] The danger of multi-year AI deals[33:28] Vendor-agnostic proxy as exit strategy