From Megabytes to Tokens: The Circle Is Complete!
Long, long time ago in a galaxy not so far away - back when the Internet felt more like a scarce resource than a utility - each of us at work received 20 MB per week.
Yes, megabytes. Not gigabytes. Not “unlimited.” Just twenty. In 2005.
We disabled images, blocked ads, compressed everything we could. And when someone went on vacation, we’d quietly spin up a tiny proxy on their machine and share their 20 MB among four people.
An extra 5 MB per week felt like discovering hyperspace.
Fast‑forward to today.
Now I’m rationing something entirely different: AI tokens.
They evaporate faster than a starship at full throttle. Subscription costs rise, model sizes grow, and the appetite for experimentation only increases.
From a Software Engineer’s perspective, it’s fascinating to watch how resource constraints keep returning in new forms.
First it was bandwidth.
Then compute.
Now - tokens.
And just like before, we’re learning to optimize, prioritize, and architect around scarcity.
When it comes to price‑to‑performance, Google, Gemini, and Antigravity are becoming increasingly compelling. Claude, meanwhile, feels a bit too protective of its token budget lately.
Maybe it’s time to revisit an old engineering instinct:
build a powerful home server, throw in a serious GPU, and run the models locally.
The tools have changed, but the principle remains the same - control your compute, control your costs, control your experimentation velocity.
The circle is indeed complete.
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