If you've built anything with the Microsoft Agent Framework (MAF), you'll notice that your tool calls can fill up the context window quite fast. A function that returns a list of 50 orders as JSON easily costs you a few hundred tokens on braces, quotes and repeated field names alone. That cost hits you twice: once on the way into the model as tool output, and again on every subsequent turn where that history gets replayed. That's where TOON (Token-Oriented Object Notation) comes in. Let's explore this. What TOON actually is TOON is a line-oriented, indentation-based encoding of the same data model JSON uses. It borrows YAML's indentation for nested objects and CSV's tabular layout for arrays of uniform objects. The trick is in that last part: if you have a list of objects that all share the same fields, TOON declares the field list once and then just streams the values, row by row, instead of repeating every key for every item. Take a small object like t...
There's a version of leadership that looks busy, looks needed, and looks like it's working but turns out to be the least effective version there is. This summer I read Bob Chapman's Everybody Matters , and one distinction from the book kept coming back to me weeks after I'd finished it: firefighting versus firelighting, as two fundamentally different modes of leadership. Chapman's point is simple to state and harder to live by. A firefighting leader spends their energy reacting: jumping from one problem to the next, stepping in to rescue a team the moment something goes wrong. A firelighting leader does the opposite. They don't chase problems. They ignite something in people, so the problems get solved without the leader showing up with the extinguisher every time. In the book, the differences are listed like this: Firefighting: Reactive by nature . You wait for the smoke before you act. The leader becomes the bottleneck. Nothing moves unti...