Tokens Are NRE, Not COGS

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 00:00:01 -0800

Right now, as an industry, we are running almost entirely on COGS and calling it innovation. Kelsey Hightower gave a talk at PlatformCon called Zero Token Architecture, and the whole thing compresses down to one sentence: infer once, export, run without inference. He’s right. I want to give you the vocabulary that makes it land in a budget meeting, because I work at a company that ships hardware, and we already have words for this.

Platform-Engineering on Greg Herlein

Tokens Are NRE, Not COGS