Why I'm building this in public

I forget things.

Not the dramatic kind. Nobody gets left at school. It’s the low, constant hum of a hundred small things that all had a place in my head and quietly fell out of it. The form that needed signing. The follow-up I promised on a call. The thing I said I’d do this weekend, said with total sincerity, and then did not do.

For a long time I treated this as a character flaw to be fixed with more effort. Better lists. Better mornings. A new app every six weeks. It never worked, because the problem was never that I didn’t care enough. The problem is that I have a finite amount of attention and I keep spending it on remembering things instead of doing them.

So I stopped trying to fix myself and started building something else to do the remembering.

The actual premise

I build AI agents that run my life. Calendar. Messages. Handoffs. The stuff that used to live in my head and leak out of it now lives somewhere that doesn’t get tired at 9pm.

That sentence sounds impressive and it is mostly not. Half of what I’ve built is duct tape. Some of it broke while I was writing this. But it works well enough that I’ve stopped being the bottleneck in my own week, and that turns out to be the whole thing.

Here’s the part that surprised me: this is the same work that makes me employable. The agent harnesses, the model routing, the token accounting: that’s a serious technical discipline that serious companies pay for. It just happens to arrive in my life wearing sweatpants, as a way to not forget the pediatrician appointment.

I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I think dads running households are doing operations research without the vocabulary for it, and the tooling finally got good enough to meet them there.

Why in public

Three reasons, in increasing order of honesty.

One: it’s the only way anyone learns this. The gap between “AI agents are amazing” and “here is the config file that made mine stop crashing” is enormous, and almost nobody publishes what’s in it. I have the config file. I’m going to publish the config file.

Two: the numbers are missing. Everyone talks about what these models can do. Almost nobody publishes what they cost to actually use. Not the sticker price per million tokens, the real bill at the end of a real build, per model, per harness, with the cache behavior and the wasted retries included. I’ve been measuring it. This site is where the numbers go.

In fact, this site is one of the measurements. I’m building it by hand, and separately I’m handing the same brief to a row of models and letting each one build whatever it wants, with the receipts published next to the result. You’ll be able to see what a website costs, by model, in dollars.

Three: I need the pressure. Things I do privately drift. Things I publish get finished. If you are reading this, you are now load-bearing infrastructure in my follow-through. Sorry, and thank you.

About the name

It came out of a call with Colin on a Tuesday in July. We were talking about content and someone said “Developer Dad,” and it went sideways into “Token Dad,” and it stuck the way a good name sticks: immediately, and slightly against your will.

The clean domain, token.dad, was about a thousand dollars. I thought about it for a day. Then I bought thetoken.dad for ten.

I’m glad I did, and not just because of the nine hundred and ninety dollars. “Token dad” is a category. The Token Dad is a guy. The “the” is doing real work: it points at one specific person who is going to be wrong in public a lot, on the record, with his name on it.

This page looks like nothing, and that’s on purpose

If you’re reading this the week it went up, the site has no design. Default fonts, no colors, no spacing. It looks like a university homepage from 1996 that lost a bet.

That’s not an apology, it’s the first data point. I froze this exact version at v0.thetoken.dad and it stays there permanently. Not a screenshot, the actual page, still clickable in five years. Every redesign after this one gets frozen the same way. So when I eventually publish something about design, you can open v0 and v3 in two tabs and decide for yourself whether I improved anything or just moved things around.

Most “building in public” is a highlight reel assembled after the fact. I’d rather leave the ugly version up.

What you’ll get here

Short version: the receipts.

I’m going to publish what things actually cost (per model, per tool, per build) with the method attached so you can check my work. I already caught myself publishing a wrong number this week and had to correct it in public. That will happen again. It’s the price of publishing numbers at all, and almost everyone avoids it by publishing adjectives instead.

If you’re a parent who suspects this stuff could hand you back an hour a day, or a builder who wants the config file instead of the pitch deck, you’re who I’m writing for.

I’m @thetokendad on Instagram, and this site has an RSS feed if you’re the kind of person who still uses one. I am.

That’s the deal. I’ll show you the builds, the bills, and the parts that didn’t work.