Essay5 min
A Billion Tokens In, I Can't Tell If My App Is Almost Done
The odometer problem: agents that work all day with no way to prove the work went anywhere. And the instrumentation that fixes it.
TOKENS: ~10⁹PROGRESS: UNKNOWN
PLACEHOLDER BODY — NOT PUBLICATION COPY. Replace everything below this line with the real draft. The frontmatter above is taken from the approved mockup and is ready to keep as-is.
Readouts are the receipts. Keep them honest: they are the one part of an entry a reader can check against reality, so a wrong one costs more than a missing one.