cd /news/ai-products/food-for-agile-thought-548-rot-retur… · home › topics › ai-products › article
[ARTICLE · art-25316] src=age-of-product.com pub= topic=ai-products verified=true sentiment=· neutral

Food for Agile Thought #548: ROT (Return on Tokens), Product Team Health, Engineers & PMs, AI Treadmill

The 548th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 35,528 peers, argues that token maxing is wasteful and that AI should compile processes into code rather than burning tokens at runtime. Packy McCormick and Markie Wagner introduce the concept of ROT (return on tokens) as a key metric for evaluating AI efficiency. The newsletter also covers product team health, the relationship between engineers and product managers, and the AI treadmill.

read1 min publishedJun 12, 2026

TL; DR: ROT (Return on Tokens) — Food for Agile Thought #548 Welcome to the 548th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 35,528 peers. This week, Packy McCormick and Markie Wagner call token maxing wasteful: AI should compile processes into code, not burn tokens at runtime; ROT (return on tokens) is... Read more »

The post Food for Agile Thought #548: ROT (Return on Tokens), Product Team Health, Engineers & PMs, AI Treadmill appeared first on Age-of-Product.com.

source & further reading
age-of-product.com — original article Stop Prompting, and Start Building Compounding AI Systems Food for Agile Thought #547: AI's 1997 Internet Moment, Code Isn't Product Eric Ries’ ‘Incorruptible’ Solved the Later Problem. AI Builders Have an Earlier One.
── more in #ai-products 4 stories · sorted by recency
sponsored brought to you by zahid.host 4,200+ EU-deployed projects
reading about agents? ship yours in a single git push.

Run your AI side-project on zahid.host

EU-based hosting, git-push deploys, automatic HTTPS, no cold starts. Free tier with a custom domain — perfect for shipping the agent you just read about.

$git push zahid main
→ Live at https://your-agent.zahid.host ✓
Get free account → Pricing
from €0/mo · no card required
LIVE [news/food-for-agile-thoug…] indexed:0 read:1min 2026-06-12 · —