Three things this month: why measuring AI by tokens is a trap, how to rebuild your content program around video capture, and what actually changed with Google's first core update of 2026.
Token consumption is the new lines-of-code
Tokens measure activity, not productivity. Measure what shipped.
We heard Meta has an internal leaderboard ranking employees by token consumption. Not official, as far as we can tell. But it's exactly the kind of thing that starts making the rounds, and it sounds a lot like measuring developers by lines of code. Here's why that's a problem.
Your best engineer writes 10 lines where your junior writes 200. The 10 are cleaner, faster, easier to maintain. Token consumption is the same trap with a new label.
People who are actually good at AI burn fewer tokens to get to the same outcome, not more. Better prompts. Tighter context. Skills that collapse repeat work into one command. Measuring tokens rewards the person who needs 14 tries and punishes the one who got it in one.
So what: measure the output. What shipped, how long it took, how that compares to six months ago. That's the number that tells you whether AI is actually driving productivity or simply scaling a different kind of busywork.
Video capture belongs in your GTM stack
Consistency is hard. I'm not great at it. Too many things competing for attention, too many priorities, not enough time. But few things matter more right now than showing up consistently with something authentic to say.
The trouble is what most of you already know. Sitting down to write the LinkedIn post, the article, the pitch script takes time. Doing it well is overwhelming.
Video capture, done right, with a content engine on the backend, is the production machine you've been missing. It's working for us. We're scaling it with our clients. Here's the shape of it.
When an idea hits, or we catch wind of something others are wrestling with, we spend two minutes on camera capturing the core point. We use Riverside. Easy to use, solid production tools, clean async capture. Out comes a transcript, a video asset we can use or not, and a raw idea we can remix into any number of downstream pieces.
The token-consumption piece you just read started that way. One capture turned into a LinkedIn post, a graphic, and the newsletter section above. Same raw material, three assets, minimal production time. Here's the rough capture so you can see what it looks like in practice.
Two things matter. Capture friction drops to near zero, so the people closest to the customer actually contribute raw material. Five subscriptions collapse into one, replacing Zoom, Otter, Descript, a clip tool, and a scheduler. That saves money. The bigger win is killing the coordination overhead that quietly tanks most content operations.
So what: if your content program is stuck on consistency, invest in a system like this to scale the message you're putting into the world. Need help? Now you know who to talk to.
Google's March core update: AI slop is out
Google got much better at catching low-authority AI content. Check your Search Console, then kill the slop.
Google's first core update of 2026 finished rolling out on April 8. Read the official core updates page from Google for the full rundown.
tl;dr; Google got materially better at catching low-authority content and AI slop. If you cranked out 50 articles on your site in a week without a human in the loop, you're likely in for a surprise. Which is good. This is where we always knew this was going. If everyone's an expert on everything, no one is.
Your homework: pull organic search traffic from Search Console and compare the 30 days before March 27 to the 30 days after April 8. Start with your top pages. If something materially dropped, that's your signal to dig deeper.
AI slop is out. Stop making it.
Talk soon,
-Mike | Trelliswork
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