Strategy & leadershipstrategy

Don't optimize tokens — max-effort everywhere as policy

Default-to-medium-reasoning misses the abundance window. Run every session on the strongest model; cap subscription cost at team level only.

TierCCatalog — Pattern outlined, candidates for deeper work
EffortS · Days
Forfounder · engineering lead

What

Deliberate counter-stance to A-025 ("medium reasoning by default") and B-073 (tiered model strategy): every agent session runs on the highest-effort tier of the strongest available model. Cap subscription cost only at the team level (if any one IC outgrows the base plan, the founder gets paged); do not cap per-task reasoning effort. Thesis: token cost today is small money relative to value and to the cost of a wrong answer; vendors will tighten limits later; spend the abundance window now.
Valid when all three hold:

  • (a) founder-scale capital (LLM bill is a rounding line, not a budget line),
  • (b) team size < 10 (every seat is a high-leverage operator, not a cost-center IC),
  • (c) workload is non-customer-facing (no per-request unit-economics pressure from a paying customer).
    Tripwire — downgrade to a tiered strategy (B-073) when any of these fire:
  • monthly LLM spend per seat exceeds ~1 day of that seat's loaded cost,
  • a customer-facing workload starts dominating volume (unit economics now matter),
  • vendor tightens limits and max-effort sessions start getting throttled in production.