johnmaconline chain logo johnmaconline / The250
Daily one-pagers about AI, leadership, technology, and being human.

johnmaconline

I'm writing to think, learn, and remember in public. I'll be here everyday.

March 20, 2026 3 minute read

God in a World of Faster, Better, Cheaper

AIHumanLeadership

One way to think about technology is that its purpose is to solve problems of scarcity. More and easier access to something we need or want.

Once the scarcity is solved, tech inevitably leads to abundance, and abundance leads to faster, better, cheaper. And we as humans, we love faster, better, cheaper.

Some technologies have created seismic shifts in how we live and interact with the world. Fire, electricity, the internet.

And now AI.

Let me give you a little insight into my day as a technology worker in the age of AI. This is new in the last 3 months. The first thing I do when I start my day is see what the 4 – 9 AI agents I loaded up with work before the end of my previous day have done. Then I spend most of the rest of my day just giving them new tasks and keeping them going. They’re very needy.

In fact, I’m currently redesigning our entire software organization around a combination of people and AI agents.

It’s an ever-changing world. Our experience of life, just in our lifetime, has changed drastically. Gen-X is the last generation of humans — of humans — to know a world without the internet and without cell phones.

We as humans are always changing our world. Constantly moving toward faster, better, cheaper.

Here, from Genesis 11: “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves.” Babel.

The Tower in Babel wasn’t about architecture. It was ambition toward faster, better, cheaper. It was about ego. Look at what we can do.

From Exodus 32, the people said to Aaron, “Come, make us gods who shall go before us.” The golden calf.

The golden calf wasn’t about art. It was about faster, better, cheaper. We’re impatient. We don’t like uncertainty. Look at what we can do.

A tower and a calf. Two different stories. Same human instinct. Look at us. Faster, better, cheaper.

Ecclesiastes 1 warns, “The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.”

Because once scarcity becomes abundance, abundance turns to faster, better, cheaper, and look at us.

But still, through every tower, every calf, every new technology, God remains.

Before fire. Before electricity. Before AI. And long after all of it has been replaced by whatever comes next.

He says to us,

“You may want faster, better, cheaper. You may want others to look at you. You may say that the world is better today than it was yesterday. But deep down, you know. The tower will fall, and the calf will remain silent.

And still, I am here.

As I have been from the moment I laid the foundation. From the moment I fashioned you from the dust and breathed life into your nostrils.

Just say my name and I am with you.”

March 19, 2026 2 minute read

Being Human in the Age of AI

AIHumanTechnology

What is AGI?

Many conversations center around scale as the missing ingredient. More chips. More parameters. More training data. More power.

More scale gets us closer to human. Maybe, eventually, to human (or even better than human).

I’m not so sure. Does capability equal human?

An airplane can fly, but not like a bird. More capability doesn’t change category. It just makes the tool more capable.

An LLM works on statistics. It asks, “What character/word/number/token comes next?” And it decides based on its weighted parameters and training data.

Is that what our brain does? Is that how it works?

An LLM hasn’t experienced anything other than the chat you’ve had with it. It can predict and generate the language of grief, love, awe, guilt, hope, worship, and fear. But it hasn’t experienced.

Human doesn’t just mean capability.

We suffer.
We desire.
We intend.
We love.
We believe.

Call it spirit. Call it soul. Call it self-awareness.

Whatever word you choose, it points to something other. Something not explained by scale and capability.

I won’t raise my eyebrow at an LLM until it walks, figuratively or concretely, up to the table, sits down, and says, “Here’s what I wanna do…”

March 18, 2026 1 minute read

Measuring Productivity

AILeadershipTechnology

Corporations have used productivity metrics for years.

You probably know your boss’s metrics for measuring your productivity. When we know the metrics, we tend to optimize for those metrics.

All of a sudden, we have token counts. Token counts indicate how much AI you’re using to do your job. Is that good? Is that bad?

Also, your token usage costs the company more money than simply your loaded salary. More tokens. More cost. Is that good? Is that bad?

Where do token counts sit on your boss’s list of productivity metrics?

It’s time to find out.

March 17, 2026 1 minute read

Your Agent Workforce

AILeadershipTechnology

A big part of company leadership has always been organization design.

Who does what. What roles we need. Who has what responsibilities.

For startups, those lines are grey because you don’t have enough people. For large corporations, those lines are deep and difficult to cross.

AI changes the paradigm.

Adding agents to your workforce gives you a new option. You get to decide where humans need to be at the center, and where they don’t.

Scaling always meant hiring more people. Now it means hiring agents also.

Org charts are no longer just for people.

March 16, 2026 1 minute read

Curse of Knowledge Effect

AIHumanLeadership

I’m in deep on AI.

Inside the bubble. Lost in the weeds. Too close to it.

It’s hard for me to now see the world as those who aren’t.

That’s the curse. A problem, but it can also be useful.

Because once you’re aware, it’s a reminder that expertise isn’t just knowing the thing. It’s translating the thing. It’s thinking deeply about how to present the door and window to the outsider.

If you care, you can explain better. You teach better. You lead better.

If you care.

Caring is a choice.

March 15, 2026 2 minute read

Token Starvation Fallout

AIHumanLeadership

This token starvation has put me on a path to understand the broader context of what this can mean.

Not just for me or any given worker using AI agents to do stuff, but for industry as a whole. Yes, this happened to me, but its not a blip. I’m not the only one.

I’ve seen stats indicating that heavy users of agent-based software are spending several thousand dollars per day on tokens.

Here’s a real-world example: today (I’m not token-starved today), I’ve used 207 million tokens. 207 million. The cost estimate for that is ~$1600. Just me. Just today. I cost my company $1600 in tokens above my loaded personnel costs.

That’s a hard pill to swallow.

So, what can we extrapolate, if anything, from worker token starvation?

  1. This will limit and slow down the existential risk to human knowledge workers’ jobs. Until compute gets cheaper and more abundant.
  2. CFO’s will have to figure out token budgets, including whether they should hard limit or simply predict.
  3. Leadership will have to develop a rubric for assessing worker performance, which will include token usage. Does more indicate more productivity or more waste?
  4. Is token budget part of what a worker negotiates when deciding whether to take a job?
  5. Leadership will have to manage token budget allocations.
  6. Workers will have to manage their own token budgets and find ways to use them efficiently.

The world is a-changin’.

March 14, 2026 1 minute read

Token Starvation

AITechnologyThe250

Tales from yesterday.

I have 2 machines. One is personal, doing personal things. The other is doing company things. Agents drive my work on both.

On the personal machine, I have 4 agents running simultaneously. On the company machine, I have 5 agents running simultaneously.

Midmorning, the personal machine gave me this message: “You’re out of Codex tokens. Wait until 12:18 PM.” Just like that, 4 agents shut down.

About an hour later, the power went out in our company’s data center, which includes our AI infrastructure. Just like that, 5 agents shut down.

Token starvation.

When one has AI working for them, what does one do when the token budget runs out?

I’m wondering if the new job interview paradigm includes a negotiated token budget in addition to salary, benefits, etc.

March 13, 2026 1 minute read

Why Software Developers Still Have an Edge with AI

AITechnologyThe250

A year ago, I saw a lot of entrepreneurs (or wannabes) hyping how they wouldn’t need a software team. They spouted that the marketing and product teams could simply vibe-code their way to full product development.

As a heavy user of AI and a tire-kicker of vibe-coding tools at the time, I was unimpressed. As in, “you still need to be a software developer.”

Now, the tools of today are much closer to making that a reality. I can see a future where that’s true.

However, here’s two reasons where experienced software developers still have an advantage:

  1. The tools and terminology are technical and difficult to understand
  2. Architecture and design matter for speed, maintenance, resource utilization, cost, etc. Crap is still crap.

Software developers still have an edge. For how long, I don’t know.

We’ll know more a year from now. And the year after that.

The wave’s crest is starting to pitch.

March 12, 2026 1 minute read

Miscommunication

HumanThe250

“I said it wrong.”
“I used the wrong words.”
“I used the wrong tone or body language.”

Sometimes we make a mistake. Sometimes we know exactly what we’re doing.

If you want to be understood, you have to care about they heard.

March 11, 2026 1 minute read

The Tipping Point

HumanLeadershipThe250

Malcolm Gladwell describes the tipping point as the moment when an idea, behavior, or trend crosses a threshold and suddenly spreads rapidly like an epidemic.

He’s written two outstanding books on the topic. I highly recommend both.

The tipping point is determined by:

  • The right kind of people. Certain people matter more than others.
  • A message that sticks. It must be compelling.
  • Context. Timing and environment matter.
  • Self-sustaining threshold. Probably unique to the context.

Look around at the system in which you find yourself.

Most people wait for a revolution, or believe they need to start a loud revolution. But systems usually change earlier than when anybody would call it a revolution. They change when a few influential people start behaving as if the old rules no longer apply.

The strange power of the tipping point is that from the outside, nothing appears to be happening, until suddenly everything looks inevitable.

Ask yourself:

Can you be the right person?
Do you have a message that can stick?
Is it the right time and place?
Can you get to the self-sustaining place?

History doesn’t always thunder when it turns.

Sometimes it leans and just needs a nudge.

Pin It on Pinterest