> Like, imagine if some serious business leader, like, idk, Mark Zuckerberg, decided to announce that Meta was going to burn money.
Like ... pivoting to the "metaverse" and changing the company name to show he's serious.
Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing
101–110 of 315 posts
Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing
#102The 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.
I really don't understand this take. If you're a carpentry shop that just bought power tools for the first time and you're worried that your employees are sticking with hand tools because that's what they know, then you look for sawdust. The goal isn't to have people work at converting wood into sawdust, the point is that if you wanna see if the tools are working you wanna see proof they're actually being used. I'm s…
Looking for sawdust is a far cry from having a leaderboard of who turned the most wood and electricity into dumpsters full of sawdust
Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing
#103Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doubt. People brought in all kinds of web applications in the early Web 2.0 era because corporate IT was being too stingy (for a lot of reasons). People will find efficiencies on their job on their own. No need to denigrate them.
I don’t know, at my company at least tons of devs were holding out on ai usage until the token maxing stuff really started. It was beyond clear by that point that coding agents were a productivity multiplier.
A lot of people believe that. Not a lot of evidence on the table for it (it’s not agent developers’ fault; empirical studies are expensive and rarely live up to scrutiny). Not sure it’s worth forcing people unless you like malicious compliance.
Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really don't understand this take. If you're a carpentry shop that just bought power tools for the first time and you're worried that your employees are sticking with hand tools because that's what they know, then you look for sawdust. The goal isn't to have people work at converting wood into sawdust, the point is that if you wanna see if the tools are working you wanna see proof they're actually being used. I'm s…
Why would a carpentry shop buy hundreds of thousands of dollars of power tools without consulting with their employees to see what they actually need to get their job done more effectively? The logic of buying the tools then forcing the employees to use them "or else" is completely backwards in any sane world. (Of course, we've all had bosses that went to some marketing seminar and come back having been tricked^Wsold…
> Why would a carpentry shop buy hundreds of thousands of dollars of power tools without consulting with their employees to see what they actually need to get their job done more effectively?
Are you suggesting that changes to new production technologies are always driven bottom up by line workers? I'm guessing that historically that's rare.
Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing
#106Tokenmaxxing 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 alway…
> Management felt like employees weren't leveraging AI fast enough. If my productivity is in line with their expectations, I don’t understand why management cares what tools I’m using to do it. No employer ever told me to use emacs instead of vi, even though I’m 10x more productive in one vs the other. So why all of a sudden does management need to micromanage my tools?
It's FOMO all the way down.
Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really don't understand this take. If you're a carpentry shop that just bought power tools for the first time and you're worried that your employees are sticking with hand tools because that's what they know, then you look for sawdust. The goal isn't to have people work at converting wood into sawdust, the point is that if you wanna see if the tools are working you wanna see proof they're actually being used. I'm s…
Why would a carpentry shop buy hundreds of thousands of dollars of power tools without consulting with their employees to see what they actually need to get their job done more effectively? The logic of buying the tools then forcing the employees to use them "or else" is completely backwards in any sane world. (Of course, we've all had bosses that went to some marketing seminar and come back having been tricked^Wsold…
> Why would a carpentry shop buy hundreds of thousands of dollars of power tools without consulting with their employees to see what they actually need to get their job done more effectively? The logic of buying the tools then forcing the employees to use them "or else" is completely backwards in any sane world.
For one, software tools are cheap, especially with OSS in the mix. You're buying one "tool" and paying for operational expenses that scale with total usage across all company.
But secondly, and more importantly, the "consulting" and discussing was done over the period of last 3 years, by ~1 year ago the high-level conclusions were pretty much locked in, the worthiness of the adoption was blindingly obvious at that point, so I can see why tokenmaxxing would be where this ended up, even though (here I disagree with the article a bit) the tools aren't at the "compounding correctness" stage just yet. It's really quite simple: the stick didn't work (telling people in increasingly direct ways to try using AI for stuff), so they tried the carrot.
$deity knows a good chunk of engineers will inadvertently fall for any trick that involves a scoreboard. That holds even when they're perfectly aware they're being tricked.
> If you want to see if the tools work, why don't you just ask your employees? Like any normal employer would?
Again, they did that, they've been doing it continuously over past 3 years. Some people are excited, some people don't care, but some - a population that's definitely overrepresented in HN comments - just stubbornly refuse to try. Now that the answers are in, and they speak in favor of AI, the companies are doing what "any normal employer would": trying to get the stubborn employers to do their job they way their bosses want them to.
(In fact, normal employers would be more eager to fire people who keep refusing top-down instructions - but it's also obvious this technology is experimental; the models and harnesses get more powerful faster than people can learn to use them - so carrots make more sense than sticks in this transition period. Stubborn people begrudgingly using those tools offer an entirely unique perspective and explore use cases and approaches that you won't get from excited adopters.)
Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t know, at my company at least tons of devs were holding out on ai usage until the token maxing stuff really started. It was beyond clear by that point that coding agents were a productivity multiplier.
A lot of people believe that. Not a lot of evidence on the table for it (it’s not agent developers’ fault; empirical studies are expensive and rarely live up to scrutiny). Not sure it’s worth forcing people unless you like malicious compliance.
Well here’s where you can level valid complaints against management I think. “Move fast and break things” doesn’t line up super well with “wait for empirical studies to back up your suspicions”
Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing
#109Tokenmaxxing 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 alway…
> Management felt like employees weren't leveraging AI fast enough. If my productivity is in line with their expectations, I don’t understand why management cares what tools I’m using to do it. No employer ever told me to use emacs instead of vi, even though I’m 10x more productive in one vs the other. So why all of a sudden does management need to micromanage my tools?
Your productivity isn’t in line with their expectations. Maybe your immediate manager but not the executives. That’s why they are doing it.
Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing
#110The 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.
I really don't understand this take. If you're a carpentry shop that just bought power tools for the first time and you're worried that your employees are sticking with hand tools because that's what they know, then you look for sawdust. The goal isn't to have people work at converting wood into sawdust, the point is that if you wanna see if the tools are working you wanna see proof they're actually being used. I'm s…
The switch away from hand to power tools was a while ago but not, like, ancient history. In the era with fairly widespread literacy and records. Did this sort of check for sawdust thing actually happen?