Part of your compensation, apparently

Marcus sent a link at 8:47am. No context. Just a URL and, below it, two words: GAME CHANGER.

The link was to the Jensen Huang story. The one about AI tokens. The proposal that engineers should receive, as part of their compensation package, a budget of AI compute credits — tokens, in the literal sense, the things you burn when you ask a model a question — because apparently the future of developer pay is a meter running in the background while you work.

I read it twice. Then I read it a third time, more slowly, in case I had missed the part where it was a joke.

I had not missed that part.

The pushback was immediate and correct: calling an AI token budget part of a developer's compensation is like calling a travel budget part of a salesperson's compensation. It's an operating cost reframed as a benefit. It's the company saying we need you to use this thing to do the job and then presenting it on the perks slide next to the gym discount and the four-day-week Fridays that somehow always fill up with work anyway.

I closed the tab.

---

The Q2 backlog is now seven items long. Three of them are the image thing, technically — the image thing itself, the image thing reframed as "an experience rather than a feature," and the image thing's ticket, which Priya opened in the meeting and which has not been assigned to anyone. They sit there in a column labelled Prioritised, which is doing a lot of work for a word.

On Tuesday, our CTO mentioned, in passing, that he'd been reading about Cursor. Not Composer 2 specifically — just Cursor, generally, in the way that you might mention a country you've just heard exists. He said it with the slightly unfocused energy of a man connecting dots that may not, in fact, be connected.

"Do we use that?" he asked.

Several of us do. I said yes.

He nodded slowly, like this confirmed something.

"So we're already doing the agents thing," he said.

This is not what using Cursor means. I opened my mouth and then closed it again, because the alternative was a conversation that would consume the rest of the afternoon and end with a new item in the backlog. Priya, across the table, had gone very still in the specific way she goes still when she's decided not to intervene.

"Yeah," I said. "Sort of."

He nodded again. You could watch the press release forming behind his eyes.

---

What's interesting about the token compensation story — and I keep coming back to it — is how well it illustrates the thing that's happening to developer work right now. Not that AI is replacing developers. More that the tools have become so load-bearing that the companies providing them have started to notice. Cursor has a million daily users. Codex has two million, tripled since January. These aren't side projects. They're infrastructure. And infrastructure, eventually, gets priced accordingly.

So here is where we are. The tools cost money. The companies charging for the tools have noticed developers are dependent on them. And somewhere in a boardroom, someone has worked out that you can reframe operating cost as compensation if you say it confidently enough and time the announcement correctly.

Marcus, for what it's worth, thinks this is a great idea. He said so in the thread, under the link, in a message that arrived while I was writing this. He's excited about the flexibility. He's already thinking about how we could structure it internally.

I have not responded.

The image thing sits in the backlog. The agent thing is now also in the backlog, adjacent to it, unassigned. Somewhere in the building, Dave is probably drafting a policy about AI token budgets in advance of anyone having asked him to. It'll be seven hundred words. It will make things worse.

I'm going to close my laptop and not think about compensation structures until at least Monday.

Happy Friday.