Kris Brandow
Works on Go tooling and hosts Fallthrough, a podcast for Go developers that picked up after Go Time ended.
“…I think ironically, we're at the point where the thing that was built to generate text, the thing we needed to do the least is generate text.”
Fallthrough · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · September 2026
Context
Brandow arrives here after walking through a project that burned billions of tokens largely because agent-written comments padded every file the model then had to re-read. His argument is that LLMs can read gnarly code directly, so the explanatory prose written for humans is now pure cost. He goes on to say words are expensive in the same way lines of code are.
Transcript
Yeah.
It's stupid. It's silly. Well,
…really like gnarly, I'm probably going to stumble over. It's going to be much nicer if there's just a comment there. But like LLMs are very good at understanding gnarly code. If you hand it, it's like, no, this is how this thing works. They can like reason through, especially more modern LLMs can like reason through it. So like, I don't even think we need it for writing code in that way. Like, I think ironically, we're at the point where the thing that was built to generate text, the thing we needed to do the least is generate text. Because like, I think we all forgot how expensive words are. In the same way that like lines of code are expensive, I think words are expensive. And when you only have like a 250,000 token context window or maybe like a high and a million, but it really doesn't really go as far as I think people think it does over the course of like a long conversation. You can't just be like wasting words on…
I mean, that was kind of me in a way, not for my own writing, but for detecting other people's writing, whether it's AI generated. Because Brian and I had conversations about this internally at Oxide, where I would review application, I would review candidate materials at Oxide for people that are…
Right.
No shades of PlanetScale. They have good tech and whatever. They're doing good stuff. But I can't do it, man. I'm sorry. I just can't do it.
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