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.