Engineering post from **Spotify** published on **September 3, 2026** on engineering.atspotify.com (~1,600 words, nine sections, two YAML manifests, four command-line examples), authored by **Dimitri Mazmanov**, Principal Product Manager. It describes a personal setup designed to move I/O tasks out of the context of **Claude Code**. The premise stated upfront: *« Most of what an AI coding agent does for me isn't thinking. It's I/O »* — reading five files to answer a question about a single method, producing a test modeled on the other twenty in the directory. **(A) The modes.** **Portal by Spotify** exposes *AiKA Modes*, declarative agents on an ephemeral runtime — instructions, model, temperature, **MCP** tools — compared to *« AWS Lambda, but for agents »*; two public modes, `bulk-reader` and `code-writer`, run here on **Gemini 2.5 Flash**. **(B) The routing.** A Claude Code plugin named `shunt` replaces `CLAUDE.md` rules deemed *« advisory, not enforced »* with three layers: `PreToolUse` hooks that block any read beyond **350 lines** (threshold adjustable via `SHUNT_MIN_LINES`), two bash scripts calling the Portal CLI, two skills that provide the invocation syntax. The corpus goes to the secondary model and **never enters Claude's context**. **(C) Measurements and their limits.** On a Java monorepo, four scenarios, the reported average saving is **~90%** on `bulk-read`; the author notes that the `code-write` scenario is *« harder to measure »*, and lists three limitations — non-delegable editing, non-delegable reasoning, **10 to 30 seconds** of latency per call. Extends the budget questions from [[gupta-token-budget-wars-marginal-token-utility-2026-05-28]] and the delegation examined in [[willison-fable-judgement-delegation-subagents-2026-07-03]].
#Portal by Spotify#AiKA Modes#shunt
Dimitri Mazmanov (Principal Product Manager, Spotify) · sur le blog d'ingénierie engineering.atspotify.com.
Post by **Ethan Mollick** published on **August 31, 2026** on *One Useful Thing* (~2,200 words). He starts from a security incident to raise an organizational question: when should an AI ask a human for help?
#agency#agency#autonomous agents
Ethan Mollick — professeur à la Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania) · auteur du blog *One Useful Thing* sur Substack.
Nicolas Martignole (Le Touilleur Express), co-written with **GLM-5.2** and **MiniMax-M3**, publishes **« The Token Manifesto »**: a pastiche of the **Manifeste Agile** (2001) transposed to the LLM era, where the unit of value is no longer the engineer-hour but the **token**. Four values: *short system prompts over clever system prompts*, *one clear example over three paragraphs of explanation*, *iterating in small steps over dumping the whole spec at once*, *outputting in a defined format over letting the model freestyle*. Twelve principles subvert those of Agile one by one — "simplicity, the art of maximizing the amount of work **not done by the model**," "self-organizing teams that spot repetition and document it once," "regular reflection **before the monthly bill arrives**." Beneath the humor ("staring at a usage bar nervously") lies a serious thesis: the real economic constraint of AI-assisted dev is no longer velocity but the **token budget** and the **context-window economy**. Two punchlines close the text: **« 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. »** Worth noting, the meta wink: a manifesto on token frugality co-written *with* models.