Nicolas Martignole publishes on Le Touilleur Express « The Token Manifesto », a short satirical text co-written with two models (GLM-5.2 and MiniMax-M3). The mechanics are clear: take the exact structure of the Manifeste Agile from 2001 — its preamble, its four values in "X over Y" form, its twelve principles — and transpose it to the world of LLMs, where the unit of account is no longer the engineer-hour but the token. The preamble sets the tone: "We are uncovering better ways of consuming context by doing it… Through the work of producing tokens, deleting tokens, and staring at a usage bar nervously, we have come to value… ".
The four values sketch an aesthetic of the frugal prompt: short system prompts over clever system prompts; one clear example over three paragraphs of explanation; iterating in small steps over dumping the whole spec at once; outputting in a defined format over letting the model freestyle. Each pits an economical practice (concision, example, iteration, constrained format) against a costly temptation (sophistication, verbosity, a massive spec, an unconstrained answer).
You don't have a prompt problem. You have a context-window problem.
The twelve principles subvert those of Agile one by one. The priority becomes delivering "the answer, not the climb toward the answer"; the manifesto "welcomes changing requirements, even late in the conversation"; it builds "around motivated individuals with an adequate context window"; "working prompts measure progress and credit the bills." The most-cited principle flips Agile's famous tenth: "Simplicity — the art of maximizing the amount of work not done by the model." Others target context debt ("spot repetition and document it once") and economic sustainability ("a prompting pace that can be sustained indefinitely," "regular reflection before the monthly bills arrive").
Two punchlines close the manifesto and carry its serious thesis under the humor: « You don't have a prompt problem. You have a context-window problem. » — shifting attention from prompt engineering to the economics of the context window — and « Everyone's a prompt engineer until they run out of monthly quota. » — an ironic reminder that real skill is measured at the usage meter.
Beyond the joke, the text crystallizes a cultural shift: in the era of AI-assisted dev, the structuring constraint is no longer velocity (Agile's obsession) but the token budget and context management. The human-plus-models co-authorship acts as a meta-signature: an argument for token frugality, written with the help of the very models it teaches to conserve.