ZEO Theory2026-08-0713 min read
Why AI Agents Don't Dissolve the Firm
Ronald Coase asked in 1937 why firms exist instead of markets. AI agents revive the question — and the old answer says the firm concentrates, not dissolves.
Rod Rivera
Topic Hub
Filed under Economics
3 entries and 2 thoughts filed under this tag.
ZEO Theory
ZEO Theory14 min read
Unverified Output Has a Negative Margin
What does one unit of agent work cost? German cost accounting spent a century proving that is not one question but several — and that answering the wrong one kills good business. Here is the version that matters when your workers are metered by the token and your scarcest input is your own attention.
Harness Engineering17 min read
What Claude Code Actually Costs — and Which Dials Move It
Your lunch break has a token price. The model remembers nothing between turns, so every request re-sends the whole conversation — which means cost scales with context carried, not work requested. Here is the cost function, the dials that matter, and the ledger line worth keeping.
Thoughts on Economics
Agent Teams Cost About 7x. Know When That Pays.
Jul 27 · 2026Agent teams go beyond subagents: one session leads, teammates work in their own context windows and talk to each other directly, and you can address any of them. They also burn roughly seven times the tokens of a single…
claude-codeeconomics
Pick a Model Per Subagent, Not Per Session
Jul 24 · 2026Custom subagents, the sub-tasks you delegate to their own context window, take a model: field, and most people never set it. It cuts both ways. A security reviewer restricted to read-only tools can run on the strongest…
claude-codeeconomics
