You spent months meticulously tracking runway, praying for users. Suddenly, your AI app goes viral—usage doubles every three days, and you’re burning $50,000 weekly in tokens. The Graph of Death looms: demand hurtling toward hard API limits. This is success, and it’s more dangerous than failure. According to software pioneer Kent Beck in his Substack analysis, this whiplash demands abandoning exploration habits for wartime expansion tactics.

The Expansion Phase: A Different Kind of War

Beck’s 3X Framework (Explore/Expand/Extract) defines the crisis:

"In exploration, you were precious about everything... In expansion, you're at war. Wars aren't won by perfect soldiers with shiny boots. They're won by whoever doesn't run out of ammunition. Your ammunition is tokens."

When token demand outpaces supply, your product doesn’t degrade—it dies. Capital ceases to be the constraint; investors will throw money at growth. The new choke points are hard technical ceilings:
- Provider API rate limits
- GPU capacity for inference
- Concurrent request bottlenecks

Survival Levers: Bend Supply or Crush Demand

With days—not months—to act, engineers must embrace tactical heresy:

  1. Bend Supply Up (The Fry’s Electronics Maneuver)

    • Spin up duplicate accounts across providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral)
    • Cache outputs aggressively—even incorrectly: user_cache[prompt] = response
    • Precompute common responses during off-peak hours

  2. Bend Demand Down (Sacred Cow Slaughter)

    • Disable token-hungry features used by <5% of users
    • Implement invite-only signups or waiting lists
    • Return simplified outputs during peak loads

The Permission Slip for Technical Debt

Beck absolves engineers grappling with scale:

"You're not a bad engineer for hardcoding API keys... You're surviving expansion."

Prioritize:
- Immediate triage (multiple provider accounts, blunt caching)
- Negotiation (beg for higher limits NOW)
- Feature amputation (cut non-essentials)

The pristine architecture? That’s for the Extraction phase. Today’s victory is measured solely in pushing the Graph of Death into next quarter. As Beck starkly concludes:

"Your investors understand this. Your users understand this. The only person who doesn’t understand this yet is you. Welcome to expansion. It sucks. It's glorious. It's temporary."

— Source: Kent Beck, Tokens: The New Oil, Tidy First? Substack