I keep seeing this take about engineers needing to burn tokens to justify their salary.

That’s backwards.
Tokens are not output. They’re cost.
What matters is how much useful work gets done per unit of compute, not how fast you can light money on fire.
A strong engineer compresses the loop.
Less tokens.
Lower latency.
More iteration cycles.
Better decisions.
The weak one brute forces it.
More tokens.
More noise.
Same confusion, just scaled.
Compute is becoming a resource constraint again.
Not because we don’t have enough.
But because most people don’t know how to use it efficiently.