Brute forcing positive outcomes by spending more tokens until a happy path manifests does not solve the underlying comprehension (and liability) problem.
I fear a world where critical software is stood up with
increasingly non-human governed abstraction _because it [seems like it] works_.
Software engineers as the review terminal in a conveyor of business-led code mass production coming to a company near you?
aurareturn 50 minutes ago [-]
Tokenmaxxing was just a way to force employees to start leveraging AI in a meaningful way.
For companies that have measured performance based on token spend, they can now dial it back. Employees have learned to leverage AI for things they wouldn’t have prior. Now they know what’s possible and what’s not.
No one is stupid enough to always measure performance based on token spend and have unlimited budget. It was always a temporary thing to transition the employees to a new world.
baconmania 29 minutes ago [-]
The implication that tokenmaxxing was an intentional and thoughtfully considered approach rather than blind hype-following by an overpaid manager class who are too far removed from value to understand the downsides of LLMs is hysterical beyond belief.
BobbyJo 3 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, the rationalization after the fact is kind if absurd. IME, the reasoning underlying tokenmaxxing at the corporate level was "we need to leverage AI as much as possible as fast as possible because we're scared our competitors will find some leverage before us".
Definitely not some measured, long term, rational out of the gate.
linsomniac 30 minutes ago [-]
That's a very good point. Our company has been very thrifty with our AI spend, until a few months ago the average employee had ~$50 of supported spend and I was trying to be an AI leader in the company and figure out what was and was not possible, I had a $100/mo spend (Claude $100 service costs $108/mo).
We are now seeing that Claude Code can do a LOT of heavy lifting in our day-to-day work, but the bulk of our employees are stuck cost-maxing and literally cannot "imagine how you are running into your session limits". "I'm fine with the $20/mo account."
There's a case for the cost-maxing has hurt our company.
herval 33 minutes ago [-]
having heard the arguments made by some VP + C-levels throughout the Tokenmaxxing Tulip Mania, I think the interpretation that those mandates were made intentionally for "forcing employees to start leveraging AI in meaningful ways" is being too charitable. Most companies focused entirely on doing "what everyone else is doing" at best or "to see if Programmer Joe can be as productive as the entire team so we can fire the rest". And many indeed fired employees in droves because they were "underperforming in token spend".
clickety_clack 16 minutes ago [-]
People in small teams with managers promoted from within could probably have had this in mind.
Big Corporate managers are much more likely to have felt the need to “do AI” from their VPs, who in turn got it from the executive team, who have probably been under fire to produce a coherent magical AI strategy that makes to company scale infinitely while reducing costs. In that environment it’s much more likely to be copy-and-pasted charts from Gartner and buzzwords overheard at conferences, combined with the hope that somebody somewhere will eventually turn it all into something that resembles forward movement.
catlifeonmars 14 minutes ago [-]
Do you have a source for this?
> Tokenmaxxing was just a way to force employees to start leveraging AI in a meaningful way.
> It was always a temporary thing to transition the employees to a new world.
Trying to understand your justification for rejecting Hanlon’s razor.
arexxbifs 19 minutes ago [-]
It really wasn't. It was a moronic move fueled by hype, implemented by the same type of incompetent business leaders who previously, to various extents, drank the blockchain and metaverse kool-aid.
There was demonstrably zero cost or consequence analysis, which is also why it was dialed back as soon as the (still) subsidized tokens became just slightly less subsidized, and the wise leaders realized they spent huge sums of money with no way of gauging ROI.
LLMs may have their use cases, but let's not make up free excuses for blithering idiots who, by any rights, should all be fired for cooking up money-burning policies that are textbook implementations of Goodhart's law.
Anyway, just needed to get that off my chest.
Chu4eeno 39 minutes ago [-]
The problem is that managers have no idea how this is supposed to help either, and just get told from above to use AI.
witx 18 minutes ago [-]
You're naive, uninformed or turfing if you think companies are still not tokenmaxxing.
Also tokenmaxxing was never an intentional and smart strategy employed by companies like you say. It was a mix of fear of missing out, signaling to investors they were in on the hype and recouping investmenets in data centers
linsomniac 38 minutes ago [-]
>I’ve basically never heard a business leader say that they were going to set a bunch of money on fire because it made them feel good.
Really? ~4 years ago our CEO hired a consultant to fly out several times to do team building exercises. We can't afford to do our 3-year server refresh cycle, but the consultant was no problem to pay.
We just recently had branding consultants come in and also spent thousands of dollars (AWS charges) on rebranding all our photos. We operate in a captive market, if you want to operate in our market you are required to subscribe to our service, and if you aren't in our market you can't subscribe. Branding at the end of the day drives 0 sales.
Heck, reminds me of the time a company I was working with hired a new CTO and one of the first things he did was as "server renaming scheme" using obscure (to the US-centric staff) city names from around the world (database servers are Swiss city names, web servers are Denmark, storage is Finland). We went from cattle naming to pet naming, for a CTO that lasted ~6 months.
In my experience company leadership is not quite as thrifty as this article likes to think they are.
EA-3167 35 minutes ago [-]
To be fair leaders usually don't say that, they say a whole lot of nothing that means "We're gonna set money on fire because it makes me feel good."
Or more accurately, "Because this is good for my career."
behnamoh 21 minutes ago [-]
Tokenmaxxing was never a thing to begin with. Just because a few companies did it doesn't mean it was a widespread phenomenon.
j45 5 minutes ago [-]
Beyond getting momentum going for a cmpany, Tokenmaxxing is lighting money on fire.
The idea of tokenmaxxing reaches different companies in different waves, so it will be discovered in waves and outgrown in waves in companies and industries in their own cycle.
In the long run, tokenmaxxing is like drunken sailor spending. Scaling is almost always about a large component of efficiency, and lighting money on fire in the street can only last so long.
Rendered at 17:38:48 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
I fear a world where critical software is stood up with increasingly non-human governed abstraction _because it [seems like it] works_.
Software engineers as the review terminal in a conveyor of business-led code mass production coming to a company near you?
For companies that have measured performance based on token spend, they can now dial it back. Employees have learned to leverage AI for things they wouldn’t have prior. Now they know what’s possible and what’s not.
No one is stupid enough to always measure performance based on token spend and have unlimited budget. It was always a temporary thing to transition the employees to a new world.
Definitely not some measured, long term, rational out of the gate.
We are now seeing that Claude Code can do a LOT of heavy lifting in our day-to-day work, but the bulk of our employees are stuck cost-maxing and literally cannot "imagine how you are running into your session limits". "I'm fine with the $20/mo account."
There's a case for the cost-maxing has hurt our company.
Big Corporate managers are much more likely to have felt the need to “do AI” from their VPs, who in turn got it from the executive team, who have probably been under fire to produce a coherent magical AI strategy that makes to company scale infinitely while reducing costs. In that environment it’s much more likely to be copy-and-pasted charts from Gartner and buzzwords overheard at conferences, combined with the hope that somebody somewhere will eventually turn it all into something that resembles forward movement.
> Tokenmaxxing was just a way to force employees to start leveraging AI in a meaningful way.
> It was always a temporary thing to transition the employees to a new world.
Trying to understand your justification for rejecting Hanlon’s razor.
There was demonstrably zero cost or consequence analysis, which is also why it was dialed back as soon as the (still) subsidized tokens became just slightly less subsidized, and the wise leaders realized they spent huge sums of money with no way of gauging ROI.
LLMs may have their use cases, but let's not make up free excuses for blithering idiots who, by any rights, should all be fired for cooking up money-burning policies that are textbook implementations of Goodhart's law.
Anyway, just needed to get that off my chest.
Also tokenmaxxing was never an intentional and smart strategy employed by companies like you say. It was a mix of fear of missing out, signaling to investors they were in on the hype and recouping investmenets in data centers
Really? ~4 years ago our CEO hired a consultant to fly out several times to do team building exercises. We can't afford to do our 3-year server refresh cycle, but the consultant was no problem to pay.
We just recently had branding consultants come in and also spent thousands of dollars (AWS charges) on rebranding all our photos. We operate in a captive market, if you want to operate in our market you are required to subscribe to our service, and if you aren't in our market you can't subscribe. Branding at the end of the day drives 0 sales.
Heck, reminds me of the time a company I was working with hired a new CTO and one of the first things he did was as "server renaming scheme" using obscure (to the US-centric staff) city names from around the world (database servers are Swiss city names, web servers are Denmark, storage is Finland). We went from cattle naming to pet naming, for a CTO that lasted ~6 months.
In my experience company leadership is not quite as thrifty as this article likes to think they are.
Or more accurately, "Because this is good for my career."
The idea of tokenmaxxing reaches different companies in different waves, so it will be discovered in waves and outgrown in waves in companies and industries in their own cycle.
In the long run, tokenmaxxing is like drunken sailor spending. Scaling is almost always about a large component of efficiency, and lighting money on fire in the street can only last so long.