How Much Does a Token Cost? The True Price of Cognition in the Post-Watershed Economy Mark Pesce · University of Sydney · April 2026 Abstract The sticker price of a token tells you almost nothing about what it actually costs to use. Every token carries auxiliary costs: the oversight, checking, shielding, and

A Measure of Safety Token Quality and the Limits of Harness Defense Mark Pesce · University of Sydney · April 2026 Abstract The post-Watershed token economy assumes that tokens can be safely directed by harnesses toward productive ends. This paper identifies a fundamental constraint on that assumption. Tokens exist in three quality

Mark Pesce · University of Sydney · April 2026 Abstract Post-Watershed, every business that does not mint tokens must spend them. This places harness engineering - the design of processes that direct token expenditure toward 𝜶 - at the centre of economic activity for nearly all organisations. This paper examines four harnesses of

Another successful Saturday putter, adding some very 2026 features to some very old hardware. The combination of Claude Code and open source brings 'dead' devices back to life... From 2012 - 2014 I ran MooresCloud, a startup designing and manufacturing internet connected lighting. Our first product, "Holiday&

Gresham's Law and the Fungibility of Tokens Mark Pesce · University of Sydney · April 2026 A brief exploration of the economics of 'good enough' tokens - Foundations of Post-Watershed Economics provides background on the topics covered here. Abstract Frontier AI tokens are fungible across a large and

Dropping a new paper this morning - if your eyes start glazing over, here's the tl;dr: The cost of cognition has collapsed - economics and business urgently need to reorganise activities around that reality. Have a read - very interested in your feedback! Mark Crossing the Watershed

Easter Holidays gave me an opportunity to dive into a project I’d come across a few months before - and it fully demonstrates the unfolding agentification-of-all-the-things… zclaw puts a powerful agent “harness” on an ESP32. If you haven’t heard of the ESP32,, it's a tiny, cheap

At the recent Homebrew Agents Club, I had a conversation with a friend deep in a startup. "We're pay $100 a month for Xero - it's just not doing the job for us, and we're not getting the support we need. So we