[tabs_or_spaces]

For me it depends on who you listen to

If you're following a bunch of people who are from LLM labs, you're going to be more incentivised to tokenmaxx because it's in the Lab's best interest tonget you to behave that way.

Practically, many companies aren't labs with endless runway. Companies hopefully follow a PnL model. And when you look at things with that lens, many of the times the LLM use case falls apart.

You're seeing a bunch of companies starting to realise that tokenmaxing yields very little ROI.

Even the LLM labs, the guy that spent $1+mil tokens has nothing to show for it in terms of revenue to the company. And you have to keep sinking that much into AI for ... "features".

There are some good use cases for AI. I ended up with a positive ROI on a greenfield project myself, albeit on a small scale.

The way that AI has been making people have totally irrational decisions on executive, pure business and technical standpoints is simply mindblowing. I don't understand how people can't take a step back and see what's actually happening from a macro perspective.

[elictronic]

Gambling. Crypto. Tulips. Ponzi Schemes. Easy money always nets the suckers. You see it enough times and you just sigh.

This to shall pass. After enough bullshit people will become fed up and enforcement of existing laws will start breaking up the most egregious items. New laws will pass. People will make and lose fortunes, and we will live on.

[__alexs]

Human systems are not good at rapidly adapting to change.

AI could be absolutely perfect and we'd still struggle to deploy it in a value generating way simply because it will exceed our ability to adapt.

So tokenmaxxing might be the wrong thing to do, but only because it's focussing on the wrong problem rather than because it doesn't actually work.

[vineyardmike]

I'll take the contrary position and say that I think the "tokenmaxxing" we've previously seen was useful (but shouldn't continue indefinitely). My TLDR position is that TokenMaxxing was a way to force discovery of Product Market Fit.

The push by companies to incorporate AI into everything is (depending on the company) either hype and cargo-culting or it was an attempt by management to (1) try and discover if/what new workflows or tools could use it and (2) force the haters to use as it got better.

Where I work, there is an obvious split between people who have been willing to use AI, and those that hated it from day 1 and mocked the "stochastic parrots". Senior folks were disproportionately haters, and generally didn't see much productivity lift from early AI stuff. They strongly resisted the mandates to use AI, and completely missed the "agentic" inflection point that other colleagues experienced. The more willing users saw Claude Code/agents and were able to experience this as the genuine benefit it can be. Now that the more senior folks are using agentic programming, they're genuinely able to maintain code quality and see meaningful speed improvements in coding tasks.

Today, tokenmaxxing doesn't make sense because we found the product-market-fit of agentic coding. Now that most (?) employees are onboard with using it, the industry can shift focus to cost-effective usage and positive-ROI usage. For example, Uber shifting to a fixed per-employee token budget.

[red-iron-pine]

> The push by companies to incorporate AI into everything is (depending on the company) either hype and cargo-culting or it was an attempt by management to (1) try and discover if/what new workflows or tools could use it and (2) force the haters to use as it got better.

"we need to figure out if we can replace you with AI, or if it just extends your abilities"

[apothegm]

Usually it’s the seller whose responsibility it is to find PMF, not the buyer.

[vineyardmike]

Most tech companies are buyers of AI, many are also sellers of AI in their own products, and a few are also building it.

[apothegm]

Sure. But the ones who are “tokenmaxxing” (I hate that term) are generally maximizing their usage as consumers.

“Try and discover if/what new workflows or tools could use it” is something that’s supposed to be done by the companies selling a product so they can then convince people to buy and use it — not something that the buyers are supposed to do.

[utopiah]

> Companies hopefully follow a PnL model.

Eh... this is HN. The goal is precisely to reach BS escape velocity and SpaceX is the model to follow. It's not healthy IMHO (I'm not an economist) but that's definitely the arm race VCs actually fund. Lose for years if not decades, achieve market dominance, squeeze. Very very few winners and for those the path is precisely NOT to follow PnL.