What if... we stop for a moment, and then, after thinking for a moment, we stop hammering nails with a microscope, and stop using token usage as a metric of productivity?
There is a complete lack of courage in the leadership of tech companies today, and top-down AI mandates are just another manifestation.
True visionaries think outside the box, but most tech executives are forcing their employees into black boxes, out of fear of not doing exactly what their competitors are doing.
We have lemmings for leaders, and that means that—much like the LLMs that are being shoehorned into everything—there isn’t room for original thinking. Everyone’s strategy looks exactly the same.
First is that despite a lot of waste, some innovation will arise from an enterprising employee finding some interesting use case. A lot of the tokenmaxxing is just waste, but out of that waste may arise a small number of genuinely powerful use cases.
Second is that many workers will be entrenched in their ways. If your executive goal is to achieve the above (find innovative ways of using AI), then you need to move everyone to use it. Most will just waste tokens, but someone may find a novel and useful way of using it that benefits the organization. It is difficult to achieve these without forcing people to act since their default is to follow the well-worn grooves.
So mandates like these are a top-down forcing function like a slime mold feeling out different paths to find resources.
Some devs in my org have fully embraced AI; some would not even use AI if not for leadership mandates and linking usage to performance reviews (I know, I think this is stupid, too). I can see why mandates could be useful since some folks definitely won't be inclined to use AI.
> but out of that waste may arise a small number of genuinely powerful use cases.
Imagine you employ me as a hotel manager, and I come to you and say: "sure I spent all our food budget internationally in three months, and sure I have nothing really to show for it, but for those three months, we had a lot of food fights"
Your manager then goes on to explain they not only need more money to cover the food budget, but also they need to quituple the cleaning budget too.
Oh and the service level has dropped, because not all clients liked being in the middle of a food fight.
However "we might have some innovation in the food delivery system of our hotel chain"
> we might have some innovation in the food delivery system of our hotel chain
This is really relative to the size of that innovation, isn't it?
> Imagine you employ me as a hotel manager, and I come to you and say: "sure I spent all our food budget internationally in three months, and sure I have nothing really to show for it, but for those three months, we had a lot of food fights"
This is exactly how startups and VC funding works, isn't it? You have an idea, give you cash to burn to prove the idea and business model. Many teams and ideas fail. But some small number of unicorns produce outsized returns to keep the whole thing going.
It's not how it should work, because food fights are stupid and have no upside.
Even if everyone else is having them.
It's not a fair analogy because AI isn't completely stupid, and there are situations where it does provide a benefit.
But a rational business would ask if the upside is worth the cost, if the pipeline can be restructured to concentrate and amplify the benefits, if some elements are better being done the old way, if there are strategic threats if tokens become much more expensive, and so on.
Instead we're getting a wave of "Cut workers, cut costs, derp" and that's as far as the "thinking" goes.
The worst thing about AI is that it shows how shallow and stupid current C-suites are.
The US used to have real tech visionaries. Now it has tech cargo cultists, all chasing an IPO cash out and hoping the music doesn't stop before they get their bag.
Imagine you employ me as a hotel manager, and I come to you and say: "sure I spent all our food budget internationally in three months, but we invented this new dish and now our restaurant is the hottest in town. Sure 95% of the food was wasted but now we can stop the waste and keep the popular dish."
The intention was to force everyone to experiment with the new ingredient monsanto recently GMO'd. Of course a lot of our employees suck, so food fights were expected, but luckily some of the employees created something great.
Absolutely, but most management are not leaders, the moment someone pushes the idea to stack rank based on token usage, it gets approved and some genuine people will be impacted.
Post-ZIRP era proved there are very few strong leaders, before that everyone was behaving like they're most amazing leader because they read some books and raised $10M
Sure, indiscriminate tokenmaxxing is a gamble that can pay off sometimes. However, I think that the decision to take any gamble should be made by someone who will bear responsibility for the downside as well as the upside. I would prefer to search for new usages in a more strategic way. I agree that experimentation is a great way to learn if done intelligently and with limits. Full “Monte Carlo” makes sense when ops are cheap enough. It seems some orgs don’t think tokens are cheap enough yet.
> I would prefer to search for new usages in a more strategic way
I think this is very, very hard for orgs to do.
Looking back at the Internet, who would have thought that it would eventually create a Netflix, Amazon, Shopify, Spotify, Google Maps, etc. Just wild the things that ended up coming out of pushing bits over a wire with few simple protocols.
In an ideal world, you make strategic bets, but I can also see the case for the opposite this early in the lifecycle of a technology. You just don't know until you try.
Mid/late 2023, it wasn't at all obvious that it would take over coding that fast.
If it were that simple and obvious, Blockbuster would have beat everyone to streaming. Sears would have digitized their catalog and used their vast brick-and-mortar stores as fulfillment centers for same-day shipping.
None of these shifts were obviously the right bet and many organizations lost because they missed the opportunity. Now orgs are on the same horizon and I can see why they don't want to miss this window.
Indeed, but that's not a bad thing. If monkeys can produce the next Shakespeare, that will be wildly popular and profitable for the company that did it, justifying the initial waste, just as VC does with companies as a whole.
> Some devs in my org have fully embraced AI; some would not even use AI
So if the people who embrace AI areore successful then the others will follow. Just like every other new tech. Why does AI have to be forced? What's the hurry? Especially when there's no clear example of a company jumping ahead because of their use of it.
It's idiots being driven by FUD. That's the reason.
There are definitely key windows here for innovation driven by competition.
There's also a need to quickly adopt and understand the technology; take the Internet for example. If we were talking about the Internet, forcing teams to build and publish web pages would be one valid way to get teams comfortable with the tech, the workflow, the shift in how to propagate and convey information to an audience.
Without a mandate, many teams won't adopt the Internet as a medium of information exchange because their processes work just fine and have worked for the last 20 years.
I think it's fair to put AI in a similar light. Unless teams adopt it and use it, it's hard for an org to understand how to get value out of this technology and how it affects existing processes and assumptions.
> There are definitely key windows here for innovation driven by competition.
Those were always there, and will always be there. The type of time frames people are getting anxious about now rarely work in the real world, though, where potential customers don’t just switch products/service provides unless they’re facing catastrophic outcomes if they don’t.
And AI is not making the difference there that people think. I worked on a product that entered the market as a newcomer, wooed plenty of customers, and even though everyone _wanted_ it, only customers _urgently_ looking for a solution got on board quick (within <6 months).
Ironically enough, the product pivoting to Agentic AI hard killed a ton of momentum and interest from customers, despite exciting investors.
Seriously. No mandates at my company. In 2023 and 2024 i had access to Claude, but frankly it wasn't until 2025 that i found the models useful enough, now i use them every day. Nobody forced me. Had they forced me, I'd probably have quit. Once the tools were sufficiently mature and verifiably helpful, people like me all over the company naturally picked up the tools too.
There was an amusing post about judging developers based on token usage where some user on HN here was pushing this idea “ICs don’t like it but this is the best way to evaluate” (something like that).
They have a whole management team and can’t seem to find a way to judge or god forbid encourage developers…
And they know things like “Dude isn’t a high performer metrics wise but his work is solid.” Arguably some of the most difficult things to know from a management perspective.
Because the higher up you go in management, the more "strategy" is a Plato's Cave like interpretation of what better/bigger/whatever competitors are doing.
If one is a CxO who's looking out for one's job security, herd-like behavior is the safest option, due to the (near universal) structure of "performance"-based executive remuneration.
Yeah courage will get you fired. Whether it be about idiot product decisions, or about how your bosses treat your coworkers. That’s the consequence of letting sociopaths get in charge.
This is actually pretty well-understood if people wanted to do it.. contrary to popular belief it's more about responsible governance than economics and not really a pro/anti capitalism thing
What if the goal of an economic system was to support everyone instead of maximizing the upside for winners? Perhaps that's the sort of change necessary for improvement. Perhaps having billionaires is the failure state.
A goal fails - who sets a goal? The keyword is system.
An economic system needs something like a Nash equilibrium where defectors are sufficiently discouraged (and cooperators are rewarded as you imply). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium
If there are any tech CEOs out there reading, I can offer my services. I will pointlessly burn unfathomable amounts of tokens, in parallel, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, all for you. Think big big big numbers of tokens, you know whats cooler than a trillion tokens, a quadrillion tokens.
Lets talk my bonus, I will open the bidding at $1 per token.
> and stop using token usage as a metric of productivity
I participate in some management-focused online communities. It’s crazy how many threads there are from frustrated managers trying to get their teams to stop thinking that their token use will be used as a proxy for their performance.
I think a few dumb companies did this and then it spread across social media, triggering a mass panic from engineers afraid their companies will be doing the same thing.
It’s getting so bad that the conversation is shifting to how to identify and coach the token-maxxers to stop wasting the team’s budget every week.
> managers trying to get their teams to stop thinking that their token use will be used as a proxy for their performance.
Because it is going to happen. Do you think metrics are tracked for fun?
Even if current leaders don't do it, next people might do it, how do you tell new leaders that we don't look at this metric? Metric exists to take action based on it
You missed the second half of my comment: There’s more to a metric than making one number go up. It’s becoming a real problem when people use 10X more tokens to get similar work done because they’re tokenmaxxing.
Nobody wants 90% of their token budget spend going to the 10% of people wasting them for number-go-up purposes.
Inefficient token use is going to become a metric.
I feel like individually, if you sat down with literally any reasonable person on the planet they would arrive at and/or agree with the tenor here.
I'd be curious to hear from people well versed in group psychology/dynamics and/or just a lot of leadership/people experience: what leads people to this type of thinking once they get in a group setting? It just... seems endemic at this point.
Obviously nobody here is going to know what I do or don't know, but I'm just increasingly curious what I am not understanding about this type of thing. It seems so obvious, yet that makes me ever more suspect that I'm oversimplifying it, or just totally ignorant about the problem in general.
It's because the average organization has lots of people who don't care about their own productivity and won't adopt new tools or processes unless forced to. This is true of most new tech - lots of workers had to be forced into using computers - but AI also has some other bumps to cross like lots of people who tried early models and then wrote them off, not realizing how fast they'd improve. And most orgs have no infrastructure or processes for allocating individuals token budgets, and most employees have no experience of properly deploying budgets.
Roll it all together and saying "just use it dammit" has some obvious advantages:
1. It's clear.
2. It's simple.
3. It eliminates all excuses employees might come up with for not using it.
The people at the top of these companies aren't stupid. They might have miscalculated how many tokens people can actually use, but that's very hard to calculate because usage is opaque and tools/processes change on a nearly weekly basis. They will eventually build out processes, tools, social conventions and performance metrics that take into account efficiency of token usage. But this is hard! Most managers aren't really assessed on the precise productivity of their teams, for instance, because productivity is often poorly defined.
> what leads people to this type of thinking once they get in a group setting
Game theory! The downside of being brave vastly outweighs the upside. For the C-suite, there is no cost to herdlike-behavior, regardless of the outcome. However, there is a very high personal downside to being a maverick, and your board later discovers you made the wrong choice against the grain. The upside of being maverick and right is very limited.
Once a behavior has become mainstream, hopping on the bandwagon is no longer individually attributable to decision-makers, but is seen (and reported) as a macro-economic phenomenon: Nadella, Zuckerberg and Bezos didn't overhire - the American tech industry overhired.
we are going through our second AI transformation, the first one didn't work that well because the tools were shit.
Whats happening now and whos driving it is interesting. The CEO has a license for this new tool (think one of the top 4, Qwen Claude, Gemini, openAI) and really likes it. So much so that they (non coder) are making lots of little single page web apps.
The COO is bollocks deep in AI, and is saying that we cannot buy any SaaS products anymore. We must make it ourselves.
The engineering manager has seen this as an opportunity to build out a brand for engineering (its a small department in a medium sized company) by delivering quickly what the large year long efforts cant.
This has formed a slopnexus where PoCs are spun up left right and centre, but there isn't much time or thought going in to making them sustainable.
What started out as a (simple ish) asset management tool, neatly scoped into a deliverable PoC has morphed into a 5 product as one monster.
Its a mess that will either lead to burn out or disaster.
Just...wow. That sounds awful, and I'm sorry for you, but I believe many other companies will or are already following that same path.
And myself being an infrastructure guy that needs to maintain all these PoCs that are now suddenly critical for production, it's the perfect nightmare.
And mind you, that dynamic always existed to a certain degree (laptop on a desk that runs some ugly Python script that does half the work of the BizOps team? Check. GCP account attached to the GSuite running a random instance for finance when the company is 101% on AWS? Check. Spreadsheet with macros that sends emails via Outlook as a mailing list manager? Check.) but at least when you discovered that you could scold them and tell them that we need to migrate this to a proper system because security.
But nowadays with vibe-coded internal apps...it's a challenge.
There is probably some opportunity here for a centralized, internal only LLM proxy which injects AGENT.md and skills and permits switching backend providers.
> what leads people to this type of thinking once they get in a group setting? It just... seems endemic at this point.
Large and fascinating topic I'm researching, very relevant for agentic AI and ML too. One way that groups can fail is that they just don't work to dampen / vote out individual errors properly (see PAC learning, Condorcet). Other kinds of errors only occur in groups, and can occur even when constituents individually aren't actually wrong. Some related stuff is:
The last is probably the most relevant here and made worse by the negative effects of hierarchy. To quote one section:
> The negative effects of informational cascades sometimes become a legal concern and laws have been enacted to neutralize them. Ward Farnsworth, a law professor, analyzed the legal aspects of informational cascades and gave several examples in his book The Legal Analyst: in many military courts, the officers voting to decide a case vote in reverse rank order (the officer of the lowest rank votes first), and he suggested it may be done so the lower-ranked officers would not be tempted by the cascade to vote with the more senior officers, who are believed to have more accurate judgement;
For token-maxxing, our "senior officers" are just executives, and line workers aren't going to vote. Who is the senior officer for those senior officers? It's not shareholders! It's really the executives of even bigger companies, because that is the actually applicable promotion ladder. It's all kind of obvious, but also a genuinely better explanation than "monkey see monkey do". These are just the simpler things, and there's more gnarly dilemmas in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_knowledge_(logic)
Wow, amazing answer! I have a lot of reading and then thinking to do, but if you are documenting your research anywhere, I'd greatly appreciate somewhere to follow it.
This is a consequence of elements of monopoly power existing in your organization. When you don't have to compete for income you honestly forget how. Then the company becomes a cargo cult of bad ideas driven by managers struggling to differentiate themselves.
You mean… increasing AI budget has no direct relationship with productivity and therefore revenue? It’s not that simple? But… my TEDx talk and LinkedIn ramblings…
> ... stop using token usage as a metric of productivity?
and tokenmaxxing is even worse due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law because whatever you measure with tokens, once you start "tokenmaxxing" you have no measure to look at
Sounds to me like you are advocating the decimation of the technology sector and a global recession that could last the better part of a decade, buddy!
The crazy thing is their salary does not actually benefit from riding these trends. Unless it's equally/even more clueless board level pressure with ulterior motives (i.e., lifting their other AI investments or the sector as a whole).
Every c suite in the country is panicking about being left behind, from their perspective it’s either token max or fade into obscurity, or at least that’s what they were sold
I don't think that's accurate. I think every C suite in the country is looking to do away with labor's leverage as much as possible. I think this is a cultural thing more than anything else, C suite + investors looking to get rid of those pesky humans required to prop up their lifestyles. AI is the most credible path toward that. Short, medium or long term returns be damned, this is a reconfiguration of society and they want to shed what they consider to be baggage.
Like anything it's a mixed bag. I am certainly working with people who I think truly believe the "max out on AI usage or become irrelevant" line. There are people who will privately let you know they're just working with the current meta the best way they can, but others who are drunk on kool aid.
Trying to operate as a rational, thinking person in a lot of environments right now feels impossible. Rational thought is being treated like AI skepticism.
its a herd mentality, its a lot easier to follow the louder voices than to spend time understanding how it impacts your own particular business. Because google does this way, or apple does this way is a common argument in lot of feature/business decisions
Please. These are the same people that force their employees to use Microsoft teams because slack is $5 an employee a month. They're not going to sit idly by while employees burn thousands a month in tokens.
It depends on which people you're referring to. The allocation toward AI budget has been so massive that I think a lot of businesses are way behind on trying to assess value for dollar for the AI-related crud they're shelling out for.
Everyone is feeling it out but the vast majority of spend has been subscription based. Some outliers may have used a massive amount of tokens but companies didn't pay for that.
That VC funded gravy train is likely coming to an end. But fortunately there are also reasonably efficient models now so that the tokenmaxxers can still make the (much cheaper) tokens go brrrr.
The next recession (and there's always a next recession) will clean up this AI bubble. The actually useful products and companies will make it the rest goes down.
I deeply believe this but have no strong evidence. Revenue has always been a cure all remedy. This will keep model providers alive along with the very wide range of companies that are experiencing growth with them (from chips to backhoes), for a time anyway. If/when that house of cards starts going in the other direction there’s going to be widespread pain. By analogy the nonsense of the dotcoms and that crash had a very direct impact on their suppliers (e.g. telecoms). My only advice is to let the Microsoft’s and Meta’s do the tokenmaxxing, and don’t get suckered into the idea you (startup, individual, etc) should be playing that game.
They get paid for saying whatever VCs want to hear and now that thing is "we have now become an AI-native company". The thing I'm still trying to understand is who is scamming whom
True visionaries think outside the box, but most tech executives are forcing their employees into black boxes, out of fear of not doing exactly what their competitors are doing.
We have lemmings for leaders, and that means that—much like the LLMs that are being shoehorned into everything—there isn’t room for original thinking. Everyone’s strategy looks exactly the same.