The wrong plank

I spent a month tuning my token spend to the penny, and couldn't tell you the last time I stood up before noon. That's the joke, and I was the punchline: the most expensive hardware in the building, depreciating in a chair.

My tokens cost about a thousand times the model's. Here's the part I skipped: those tokens come from somewhere. Every judgment call, every review that needs a human, every "this is wrong but I can't say why yet" is a body doing the work. Sleep, blood flow, the boring machinery of a working brain. We price the output and skip the maintenance schedule. Nobody treats a server this badly.

Stepping away used to cost throughput: the execution left with me, so the chair won every argument. Agents flipped that. Builds run, branches land, the review queue fills whether I'm at the desk or not. That time was always going to pass with me waiting on it. Now I spend it moving, and the sharp version of me clears the queue faster than the chair-shaped one ever did.

So I move. A walking desk carries most of the day. The rest happens in the gaps the work already has: a chore, a set on the equipment, a walk when a hard problem needs the part of my brain that only talks while I'm in motion. The fortieth rep doesn't arrive as fresh as the first. (My review essay brags that the fortieth agent pass does. The difference is that the rep is supposed to hurt.)

You don't need my setup. The same waits sit in any office day: a build, a review, a coworker who owes you an answer, an agent still churning. Doom-scrolling them is not rest. Take a lap around the floor, do a set of squats by the desk, open a brain-training app instead of the feed, or get a quick walk in. The wait passes either way. Spend it on the machine, not against it.

None of this is a wellness column. It's capacity planning. The bug only a human can catch gets found by a rested human paying attention, and rest is manufactured off the clock. The other essays here argue that human attention is the scarce input, and you should spend it where it pays. This one is the supply side: attention is produced, not just spent, and the hardware that produces it answers to embarrassingly simple maintenance. Move. Sleep. Put the phone in the other room.

The agents don't need me in the chair. They need me sharp for the decisions that matter.