41–50 of 268 posts
People who don't code(management, leadership) think AI will 10x the company but it's really a 40-60% boost. But engineers have to feign adopting this tools in fear of layoffs
People churning out slop is slowing me down and the full effects of it won't be felt for a while.
This measuring of tokenmaxxing as a proxy for something beneficial to the company has got to be the single dumbest thing I have ever heard of in my entire software career.
It would be like some company in the dot com era measuring employee's internet download traffic as a proxy for productivity or internet-pilledness.
Why not just reward employees based on who's submit the largest expenses claims? That might have some correlation to work too, right ?!
“Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.” ― Charlie Munger
I swear the industry is being Garry Tanned. Senior management let go our localisation staff. Now they want us to use AI to translate. They still want manual review. We use Github Copilot at work, we get a measly 300 requests with the budget to go over if necessary. Opus 4.7 or GPT 5.5 would eat all of those up in a day. Are we supposed to be using more than the allotted amount, do management see that as a good thing.…
How you burn 300 requests in a day? From my Copilot usage Opus consumes surprisingly few requests to do a lot of stuff. It isn’t paying by token but instead by prompt or something.
That said, I’m kind of having a blast using CC in corporate with all the connectors available at our disposal, and I baffled how little some of my coworkers know about what’s available and what the capabilities are. So it’s clear that perhaps some encouragement is prudent for those who are slower to embrace new technologies, but I’m not sure tokencounting and tokenmaxing are the answer.
The fact that management signed off on measuring AI use through token usage shows how incompetent management really is, including in allegedly technical conmpanies like Amazon. Tokenmaxxing was an entirely expected and rational response. IOW You measure employees in stupid ways, you're going to get stupid behaviour as a consequence.
It makes for pretty charts, extrapolations, and projections.
It doesn’t matter if the numbers are not particularly correct. As long as the data gathering step can be justified it’ll do. Though bonus points if making the number bigger is a good thing (v.s. tracking something like number of sev 1 issues).
The fact that management signed off on measuring AI use through token usage shows how incompetent management really is, including in allegedly technical conmpanies like Amazon. Tokenmaxxing was an entirely expected and rational response. IOW You measure employees in stupid ways, you're going to get stupid behaviour as a consequence.
It's quite possible they aren't trying to measure performance but are literally just trying to increase token consumption to feed the bubble and hype.
Plus pressure employees may find new unique use cases for AI.
It's like if your goal is inflation, you give out tons of money and as long as its spent, you achieve your goal.
The fact that management signed off on measuring AI use through token usage shows how incompetent management really is, including in allegedly technical conmpanies like Amazon. Tokenmaxxing was an entirely expected and rational response. IOW You measure employees in stupid ways, you're going to get stupid behaviour as a consequence.
Management loves numbers because they’re the only things you can objectively compare as X > Y. It makes for pretty charts, extrapolations, and projections. It doesn’t matter if the numbers are not particularly correct. As long as the data gathering step can be justified it’ll do. Though bonus points if making the number bigger is a good thing (v.s. tracking something like number of sev 1 issues).
I have mixed thoughts on this. These thoughts are my own. On the one hand, it’s objectively silly to pretend like we’ve solved the age old problem of measuring developer productivity. Metric-obsessed leadership can also be intolerable, counterproductive, and it’s a good way to paint yourself into a corner undervaluing your best talent and overvaluing your mediocre talent. That said, I’m kind of having a blast using C…