A sprint poker alternative for AI-driven teams

Classic planning poker is great at one job: getting a team to agree on effort. But teams increasingly want more from a single planning round. They want to surface cost, spot AI-heavy work early, and avoid surprises once implementation starts.

Common reasons teams shop for a planning poker alternative include wanting a cleaner reveal flow, no login friction, and — for AI-assisted teams — a way to capture expected token usage next to the usual effort estimate.

When a team uses AI coding tools, two tickets with the same story-point score can have completely different costs. One is a quick, well-scoped change. The other needs large context windows, repeated prompting, and careful review. Story points treat them as equal; the AI bill does not.

A standard sprint poker tool has no place to record that difference. The conversation about token burn, prompting strategy, and model choice happens informally, if at all, and the signal is lost.

Story points and token estimates answer different questions. Story points ask “how hard is this to build?” Token estimates ask “how much AI usage will this likely consume?” In AI-assisted teams, both signals can matter for prioritization, budgeting, and deciding what to automate next.

Keeping them as two separate votes is deliberate. It keeps the familiar story-point discussion intact while making AI cost an explicit, first-class part of planning rather than a hidden assumption.

Token Poker is the stronger choice when your team ships with AI coding tools and AI usage is a real cost or planning variable. If you want to spot expensive, context-heavy, or automation-risky tickets before implementation, the second estimate earns its place.

If your team does not use AI coding tools in delivery, or AI usage is negligible, a classic planning poker tool is perfectly fine. The token estimate only adds value when AI cost is a genuine part of how the work gets done. We would rather be honest about that than oversell a second number you do not need.