"token anxiety"; or, a slot machine by any other name
16 Feb, 2026
I realize it's gauche to blog about some shit you saw on bluesky but yesterday I saw a post that encapsulated so much of what has been bumming me out about the rise of coding agents over the last year. this dread had been slowly rising from seeing blogs about using claude code from your phone while getting ready for work, while commuting, while waiting to pick your kids up from school, but it's come to a head.
Token Anxiety i think i mostly echo this for myself. with so much that can be done, i often feel like i should be doing something, always
[image or embed] — Tim Kellogg (@timkellogg.me) February 15, 2026 at 6:44 AM
now obviously the opinions of founder-brained SF social bubble weirdos should be immediately discounted; they are the spiders georg of this industry. but at the same time they are playing into the dreams of management, the worker that never stops working, that's always online, that's infinitely Productive, always shipping, always wants to get back to work. I imagine this archetype exists in other industries but my experience is limited to tech so I will stick to that.
my fear is that this will become the norm. anecdotal evidence tells me that more and more companies are adopting AI for their engineers to use, encouraging (and in some cases requiring) its use in an effort to boost productivity, despite no actual evidence pointing to these improvements and Anthropic-funded research indicating that AI usage reduces skill retention .
so where does this lead us? we know that some US tech companies are starting to embrace the "996" schedule popularized in China's tech industry. enforced usage of coding agents makes that push even easier—is it really work if all you're doing is telling the computer what to do and then reviewing it to make sure it didn't do anything wrong and also babysitting it all hours of the day?
many have already observed that working with coding agents, which require constant attention and often generate low-quality code with (by design) random results, are a slot machine. they are loot boxes. they are gambling. you are constantly pulling the lever and hoping you get the SSR SaaS Passive Income product. you will not get this, but maybe you will. just one more prompt, one more pull, one more revision, one more go at being Absolutely Right .
... continue reading