Stop Wasting AI Tokens

ℹ️ EPISODE INFO

Released

November 4, 2026

Duration

28m

Channel

YC Root Access

Watch on YouTube

▶ Open ↗

📝 EPISODE DESCRIPTION

Weave (YC W25) helps engineering teams understand whether their AI coding tools are actually making them more productive. Its models measure the work humans and agents produce and compare that output with AI spending. The company recently raised a $13.5M Series A led by Standard Capital and launched Weave Router, which selects models for different coding tasks. In this Fireside, co-founders Adam Cohen and Andrew Churchill discuss how they went from measuring human productivity to optimizing coding agents, why cost per output matters more than raw token spend, and how their AI coach helps engineers work more effectively with agents. They also share their vision for autonomous software factories and explain why combining different models’ strengths could outperform any single model. https://weaveos.com Chapters: 00:00 — Optimizing AI Coding With Weave 04:02 — Getting More From Your AI Budget 08:39 — Measuring Work Beyond Lines of Code 12:30 — From AI Adoption to Optimization 16:47 — Measuring AI ROI and Coaching Engineers 20:16 — Building Software Factories 25:38 — The Future of Model Routing Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply Work at a startup: https://www.ycombinator.com/jobs

🎤 SPEAKERS

• Adam Cohen

  guest

  Co-founder of Weave; discusses engineering productivity metrics, agent evaluation, and model-routing economics.

• Andrew Churchill

  guest

  Co-founder of Weave; focuses on the Weave Router’s technical approach to routing coding tasks across LLMs and evaluating outcomes.

🧾 EPISODE SUMMARY

In this episode of YC Root Access, featuring Adam Cohen and Andrew Churchill, Stop Wasting AI Tokens explores Weave Router automates model choice to optimize AI coding cost Weave is described as a system that measures engineering productivity and quality, then uses those measurements to optimize how humans and coding agents deliver software.

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