Story points are unicorn dust that crumbles under any attempt of serious optimization. The fundamental problem is that SP is not an objectively defined metric. If we come under serious pressure to improve velocity measured by SP, there's nothing to stop that initiative from trickling down into the SP estimation/measurement. SP works fine as long as you don't look too closely at it.
Yeah everything is subjective unicorn dust but there are ways of making sure story points have some semblance of accuracy. Either ways it’s probably the best metric we have atleast for an established team.
We had a way of measuring velocity, but who cares about estimating stories when we could be spinning up more agents? Burn a bunch of tokens and those stories will be DONE before you could even find your planning poker cards!
I've lived through a bunch of initiatives about improving planning and estimation. None of them turned into a stable process that worked for anyone. I don't know if I can extrapolate from that, but it gives me an inclination that no one really trusts anything that comes out of task estimation. Which would be why we're looking for more objective metrics like token burn rate. No room for argument - tokens are tokens!
A token is approximately word generated by a LLM; a few dozen tokens gets you a line of code... so measuring token burn rate is the same as counting lines of code. All it took was a change of name, and we're back to the most primitive metric we ever got for measuring programmer productivity.
I don't think I can take anything from management in tech seriously again after tokenmaxxing.