Nicolas Martignole

Nicolas Martignole publishes «The Token Manifesto» on «Le Touilleur Express» in July 2026, co-written with two models, «GLM-5.2» and «MiniMax-M3». The text takes the exact structure of the 2001 Agile Manifesto (preamble, four "X over Y" values, twelve principles) and transposes it to a world where the unit of account is the token rather than the engineer-hour. The four values argue for frugality: short system prompts over clever ones, one clear example over three paragraphs, small iterations over dumping the whole spec, defined output formats over letting the model freestyle. The most quoted principle inverts Agile's tenth: "Simplicity, the art of maximizing the amount of work not done by the model." Two closing lines carry the serious thesis under the satire: "You don't have a prompt problem. You have a context-window problem," and "Everyone's a prompt engineer until they run out of monthly quota."

The manifesto is not Martignole's first pass at what AI does to engineering work. In June 2025 he published "Ni manager, ni contributeur individuel…", which splits the developer career path into three roles: AI Orchestrator (managing an army of models), Augmented Craftsman (hands still in the code), and Code Philosopher (questioning why the code exists at all). Both pieces name a cost that structured metrics miss. The 2025 article calls it "cognitive load 2.0", the burden of validating code you did not write and may not fully understand. Martignole's own formulation of what remains: technical autonomy now means understanding when, what, and why to code.