Will Work For Tokens

Usage limit reached. Resets in four hours.
He said he'd wait.
He did not wait.

Monday. He asks it why the button's blue.
Two hours later he's deep on sea snails and Byzantine dye.
Emperors, a law about who gets to wear purple,
and the button? Still blue. He forgot why.
Monday. He opens one tab to check one thing.
Now it's forty-one tabs and every one of them pings.
Twenty-three minutes, fifteen seconds to come back from a ping.
He gets one every four. You do the math.
He asked the bot. Then he asked it who invented math.
Wednesday. Where'd Tuesday go?
Six agents, six terminals, all of them on go.
One writes the code, one writes the tests,
one deletes what the first one wrote and calls it a fix.
He's the manager now. He tabs, he nods, he approves.
He says please to the agents. Just in case they remember who was rude.
The bot compacts its memory when the window gets full.
His just... goes.
Compacting conversation.
And he goes: wait. What was I building?

Just one more prompt (one more)
Just one more run (one more)
He can see the finish line from there,
it's in a tab he hasn't opened yet.
Credits exhausted. Usage stopped.
Oh, honey.

Will work for tokens.
Spare a little context, friend?
Will work for tokens.
He was this close to the end.
Forty-one tabs and nothing shipped,
he had a plan, he had a plan,
will work for tokens.
(Just one more prompt)

Sunday. Fifth and Market. Sharpie on a box.
The box his second monitor came in. For more terminals. Of course.
Guy on the next corner's got a bigger sign.
Uber. Blew the whole year's budget by April.
Their CTO spent twelve hundred bucks in two hours. On a demo.
He respects that. That's the dream.
A lady drops a quarter. He says, "Great question."
She didn't ask one.

Just one more prompt (spare change?)
Just one more run (spare change?)
He can see the finish line from there...
Card declined.
Saw that coming.

Will work for tokens.
Spare a little context, friend?
Will work for tokens.
He was this close to the end.
Forty-one tabs and nothing shipped,
he had a plan, he had a plan,
will work for tokens.
(Just one more prompt)

But here's the receipt.
July. Sixteen developers. Two hundred forty-six real tasks.
With the AI, they felt twenty percent faster.
They were nineteen percent slower.
Productivity detected?
Felt fast, though.

He hired a hundred agents
so he'd never work again.
Now they run all night
and he's the one who waits on them.
He's the intern.

Will work for tokens.
He just clicks approve all day.
Will work for tokens.
And the agents never pay.
How many tabs you got open, babe?
You had a plan, you had a plan,
will work for tokens.
(Just one more prompt)
(Just one more prompt)

Limit reset.
He doesn't even look up.
Okay. Just one more—