The Token Manifesto
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.
Nicolas Martignole (Le Touilleur Express) · avec GLM-5.2 et MiniMax-M3