Coding Agents Are in the SDLC. Token Economics Isn't.

AI coding agents are now in the dev lifecycle. Token economics is not yet. Almost nobody can tell you what their system produces per million tokens spent. Teams are shipping faster, the token bill is growing — but it is the only number anyone is actually tracking.

GitHub Copilot moved to token-based billing on June 1, and some developers reported bills 25× higher than the month before. That is not a pricing story. That is a planning story. A sprint used to tell you what a team produced. A token bill tells you almost nothing on its own.

The metric that would tell you something is revenue, margin, or value created per million tokens. Until teams start tracking that, token economics stays in the finance review and not in the design decision where it belongs — and the design decision is where the cost gets built in.