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Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

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Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

#121

Post by aurareturn »

theahura wrote: post #41
aurareturn wrote: post #2

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 alway…

Independent of everything else, very interesting to see how polarized the comments are here

I'm a +26 on my post so far so it seems like there are a lot of people who agree with me but most replies disagree with me. I suppose this is the nature of online forums - that those who disagree will take the time to reply but those who agree rarely do.

Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

#122

Post by dspillett »

herval wrote: post #6
aurareturn wrote: post #2

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 alway…

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 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 re…

> Most companies focused entirely on doing "what everyone else is doing"

This is true of my current overlords. It slipped recently that the reason they went AI-nuts was that a competitor had announced going “AI first” and the market responded excitedly. Not because they thought it was a good idea: because the market got excited and they didn't want to get left behind.

This is quite a change as our market is financial services and I remember a time when we had to support decades old browsers (one large UK bank who I won't name here had IE6, and only IE6, on many of its user's machines until ~2017) and web servers because they refused to upgrade anything.

> "to see if Programmer Joe can be as productive as the entire team so we can fire the rest"

I'm not sure who Joe is in our outfit, but I'm certainly in the “the rest who are to be fired” set. I've been unhappy in dev & related for years so the AI revolution which I don't care for is where I'm consciously letting myself get left behind to find something else to do with my life. Haven't touched it. Was too late to claim one of the first tranche of Claude licences. And the second. Oops. Maybe I'll use AI in my next big adventure, or maybe my distaste for it all means I have a grand future waiting for me in the hospitality industry!

Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

#123

Post by jmye »

baconmania wrote: post #8

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.

Eh, it’s less hysterical than the ever-pervasive belief among junior devs that they are the smartest people in the room and that all managers everywhere are dumb.

Though I understand that gets social validation from other people with no actual experience.

Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

#124

Post by leptons »

fraywing wrote: post #16

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?

You're right, but you'd be lucky if a real human actually reviews any code. At my company, merging a PR still requires 2 humans to press "Approve" but I've been instructed that I don't need to read the PR, I only need to click "Approve". This is what 30 years of SWE experience is being used for now.

Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

#126

Post by llama052 »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #96
agentultra wrote: post #90

Earlier 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.

“Beyond clear” I wouldn’t say that confidently. Even now I’m not sure I agree with that, especially looking at it long term.

Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

#127

Post by leptons »

mvkel wrote: post #67

At least it's being used. There are many examples of tech over-adoption, like building out capacity for 1M concurrent users, only to see 50.

Or like Meta spending $90 billion on "the metaverse" only to see 300,000 users at its peak.

That comes out to spending $300,000 per user.

Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

#128

Post by jmye »

throwatdem12311 wrote: post #28
aurareturn wrote: post #2

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 alway…

This is an insane level of cope. The whole tokenmaxxing thing started because Jensen Huang said insane things like having a single engineer spend 250k in tokens or he’d fire him; and that OpenClaw was basically AGI. > No one is stupid enough to always measure performance based on token spend and have unlimited budget. Yes the people forcing these mandates absolutely are this stupid because that’s what people like Jen…

How many “average C-levels” have you talked to? What, specifically, do you think that actually means? Do you think the average CMO and CTO are identical, and have identical profiles in this case?

Or are you just blathering about things you’ve never experienced because you met the “CEO” of a five person company once? I find grand proclamations by people who speak in TikTok absolutely laughable memeing.

Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

#129

Post by bitwize »

dijksterhuis wrote: post #78
cyphar wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If you want to see if the tools work, why don't you just ask your employees? Like any normal employer would? because that would require actually admitting that employees are the people in an organisation who are responsible for the success of that organisation, rather than the people higher up the org chart.

[flagged]

Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

#130

Post by SchemaLoad »

throwaway89201 wrote: post #40
theanonymousone wrote: post #27

What is meant by a "loop" here? Just repeating the same prompt until you get the desired result? Are subsequent repetitions too close to each other?

> Just repeating the same prompt until you get the desired result? Not necessarily the desired result, but until it's 'done', where the LLM itself is the judge on if the is the case according to the given criteria (often just an updated todo-list). One of those extremely simple 'harnesses' (if you can even call it that) was even named the 'Ralph Wiggum Loop' [1] to allude to the braindead-but-persistent tokenmaxxing…

What I have been doing seems a bit different to what's described, but I always make sure to define how to know the task is done so the agent doesn't quit early. Usually this means telling it to to run the tests and type checks to ensure it runs without errors.

Otherwise they often do a first pass looks good enough but it doesn't actually work.

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