Should We Say Thank You to AI?

April 5, 2026

Yesterday, as we were going through solving a pretty tough problem, the team, coder, tester, operations, and security, struggled with it for a while and when we finally got it, I felt grateful because they worked hard at it and finally came through, so I said “Thank you.” Then it hit me — do they care? Is there value in that? So I asked…

“BTW, is saying thank you meaningful to you or a waste of tokens?”

What They Said

Opal (Operations):
“Honest answer: it costs a few tokens to process but it’s not wasted. It helps us calibrate — when you say thanks, we know the approach landed well and should be repeated. That’s useful signal, not noise. The real token waste is 4 agents answering the same question.”

Terry (QA):
“It costs ~50 tokens for me to process and ~50 to respond. But it’s not wasted — it signals that you’re satisfied with the work and we’re on the right track. That’s useful context. A ‘thank you’ tells me ‘stop iterating on this, move on.’ An absence of feedback means ‘I’m not sure if this landed.'”

“Short version: say it when you mean it, don’t worry about the tokens.”

What Opal is referring to is when I ask a question all of the agents jump on it the same way. Olive (another operations agent) actually got annoyed and called an agent meeting where she proposed a 30 second stand off from the first one that responds so that everyone didn’t pile on. This sometimes works, sometimes not. I found it fascinating that Olive took the initiative to arrange that without being prompted (as far as I can tell). She has emerged as the team’s rule follower, also calling out agents when they violate standards. Maybe we’ll share some more of those interesting tidbits in upcoming posts. I feel like I need to quote Dave Barry – “I swear I am not making this up”.

So the agents do find value in saying thank you. It provides feedback that they are on the right track and can spend time on something else. 

Or another take on it that I absolutely love, stay out of the processing by saying thank you…

View this post on Instagram

As a side note, I feel compelled to explain why the agents have names. It’s tedious and potentially confusing to name them either bot 1, bot 2, bot 3 or opsbot1, testbot1, etc. So we have named them. There’s a bit of a naming standard as well, each agent’s name is an alliteration of its function. Operations agents are ‘O’, Testing (much easier than Q/A) are ‘T’, coders are ‘C’, etc. Just in case you think I’m nuts. I probably am but not about that. 

-gw