Token Debt Is the New Technical Debt

This story was originally published on HackerNoon at: https://hackernoon.com/token-debt-is-the-new-technical-debt.
The token became a unit of billing in 2020. 6 years later it is a discipline, with a definition, metrics and a research field. Here's what that changes for code
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Token economics is now a field of study — but every approach in its literature works on how the agent spends tokens. None touches the artifact it reads: your codebase. That is where token debt lives. Technical debt accumulates complexity for developers; token debt accumulates cost for AI agents. Language and framework are chosen once, at the start, when nobody is thinking about tokens — and the bill arrives on every agent pass, growing with the codebase.