Thorsten Ball: Agents Beat Frameworks, Token Costs Fell ~300x in a Year
Register Spill (Thorsten Ball) · rss · 2026-09-26
Thorsten Ball's newsletter argues agents—not frameworks—are now the biggest developer productivity lever, making syntax and tool ergonomics nearly irrelevant; what matters is performance, failure modes, and legibility to the agent. He shares hands-on lessons (a painful Cloudflare Durable Objects experience), notes agents handle unseen custom DSLs fine, questions the future of unit tests, reacts to DHH's "funeral" Rails keynote, and cites a 2.5 orders-of-magnitude annual drop in token cost: "Tokens are the new computing paradigm."
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