Executive View
CIOs should allow AI coding and agentic development workflows to scale only where ownership, accepted-output value, cost visibility, quality impact, and exit risk are visible. Token consumption is useful telemetry, but it is not evidence of productivity. The governance unit should shift from the tool license or token meter to the workflow.
This brief is strongest for medium-to-large enterprises where AI coding assistants are moving from individual developer use into shared engineering workflows like CI/CD, testing, documentation, security review, and release operations. The argument is less urgent where usage remains ad hoc, experimental, and isolated from production delivery.
AI workflows can look inexpensive at the prompt level but become expensive when they are repeated, automated, and embedded into developer tooling. The Register’s useful provocation is that tokens are easy to count but poor at measuring useful work, especially for code generation, debugging, and …