Token: One Word, Five Meanings
“Send me the token.” “We ran out of tokens.” “It’s a token on Ethereum.” Three sentences, three unrelated things, one word. Add the two older meanings from linguistics and compilers and you have five. Anyone building with AI agents runs into most of them in the same afternoon, because an agent spends tokens to call an API with a token. They share one idea: a token is a small thing that stands in for something else. What it stands in for is where they part ways. Each section below has a short animation. They play as you scroll, and the dots let you step through them yourself. ...