[plaguuuuuu]

AI mandate is one of the best things that's happened to me. It's the easiest metric to game in the world.

At one point my boss asked why my AI usage was lower than other team members. I instantly knew what to do. Every session is now run at ultracode effort. My automated PR review bot averages like $80 in usage per PR review.

[tudelo]

It is extremely easy to burn tokens if that is required. Explore this codebase. Team x wants y feature, research and generate a full plan. What does feature x in codebase y actually mean? Analyze code coverage in x. Map out code flow and find concurrency bugs in y and on and on...

Oh and my favorite: Use 5 independent subagents to review code change and summarize the findings, and for any finding determine if they are real concerns

[cevn]

The other day claude spun up 100 agents and took an hour to type 30k token document to tell me something was impossible to do. I googled it, found a pr on the 3rd link that showed it was possible. "You're absolutely right!!"

[lostglass]

"You can't use reflection if the classes aren't in the class loader" "I see why you would think that however this should work, let's test it."

-Claude, burning my company's money.

[ffsm8]

There is value in doing all that too, though. Admittedly with strong diminishing returns, but it's there.

Eg by doing that I was able to develop non-essential features which increased our quality of life for devs last month without going through our PO who'd need to price it - because that does let's you create changes in an incredibly hands off manner with miniscule amount of time investment if you already know what you want to achieve, and how the end result should be...

Admittedly, that's a pretty narrow usecase which is rarely the case- but if it is...

[Forgeties79]

Afterwards, give me 5 separate documents with 10 plans each for how to implement this. Triple check your work, make no mistakes. Then give me 3 distinct executive summaries emphasizing different areas.

[flowerthoughts]

And the more uselessly amusing thing is that the manager who requests higher tokens usage probably also doesn't care whether it's producing slop or not. Metric goes up; managers happy until CFO is reported income hasn't gone up as quickly as costs, and that makes the CEO optimistically concerned. Never expect underlying thought from a messenger.

It's interesting that LLM barely had any vetting period or experimentation phase. Suddenly everyone was supposed to test it in production, it seems.

[EmanuelB]

https://github.com/dtnewman/burn-baby-burn

Get ready for that promotion!

[tgv]

That's corporate eco-terrorism. How did we sink so low?

[oblio]

It's even worse/better. It's corporate financial malpractice. At some point they will wake up after the AI psychosis dies down. That might take 1-2 more years. After that most companies will realize that AI is a tool, as OP said, and adjust budgets accordingly.

[delusional]

Importantly, "adjusting budgets" here is for most companies, you know the ones you have to fight to even get an IDE license, a euphemism for zeroing the budget.

[rwmj]

It's also the easiest way to determine if your management has AI psychosis or not, and make corresponding decisions about whether to stay with the company.

[KronisLV]

I'd unironically like my workplace to cover AI spend for me.

There's so, so much mechanically simple but time consuming refactoring that should be done but nobody ever does that because there's never enough free time. Or even various utility scripts and at least finding out of date docs (or writing very basic ones where none exist, though it'd be hard to get them not to feel like slop writing). Or figuring out what additional custom linter rules would be useful, how to improve the CI pipelines and so on.

If I had the Anthropic Max 20x subscription, I could make a large part of the technical backlog disappear (relatively safely).