The Enterprise Playbook for Token Discipline
Four levers, one Charter, one role — the governance discipline that separates AI programs that compound from those that bleed.
Production inference cost is governed by token discipline, not price-per-token. This episode walks through the four levers — model selection, workflow architecture, data pre-work, and prompt literacy — plus the Token Strategy Charter, the Token Architect role, and the Anti-Patterns Gallery. Built for CFOs, CTOs, Heads of AI Platform, and the Staff+ Engineers who implement their decisions.
Ep. 03
The Enterprise Playbook for Token Discipline
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The Token Economy: A First-Principles Playbook for Governing Claude in Production
At 11:47 PM on a Thursday, a Series C fintech spent its entire monthly inference budget in four hours. The root cause wasn't a malformed JSON — it was the absence of a governance discipline that should have been established before a single line of code was written. This paper specifies that discipline: four levers, one planning artifact, one role, one cadence — in the vocabulary CFOs, CTOs, and Staff+ Engineers already use.
The Token Economy: Governing Claude in Production
This video walkthrough accompanies the whitepaper of the same name — covering the $312K incident that opens the paper, the four economic levers (model selection, workflow architecture, data pre-work, prompt literacy), the Token Strategy Charter planning discipline, and the Anti-Patterns Gallery. Intended for CTOs, Heads of AI Platform, and the Staff+ Engineers who implement their decisions.