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Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

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Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

#201

Post by IanCal »

therein wrote: post #24
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…

> Tokenmaxxing was just a way to force employees to start leveraging AI in a meaningful way. No, it was a sinister way to manufacture your consent to cause cognitive atrophy in your employees so that you lose your ability to independently operate your business. You'll come to realize this once they begin charging you more and more for tokens but you will probably not blame yourself for it.

This feels like it’s on the level of claiming conspiracy theories are invented by tin foil companies to sell more hats.

Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

#202

Post by TeMPOraL »

oblio wrote: post #189
TeMPOraL wrote: post #107

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. For one, software tools are cheap, especially with OSS in the mix. You're buying one "tool" and paying for…

> the worthiness of the adoption was blindingly obvious at that point Everything is so "blindingly obvious" yet nobody can point to ANY serious peer reviewed studies that prove it. I'm patient, I'll wait.

You don't need peer reviewed studies to tell you water is wet.

Peer review is a technique to get evidence from data when SNR is low. It's not "science", it's just a technique. So is "throwing shit at a wall and seeing what sticks". Don't turn techniques into rituals, and science into religion.

Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

#203

Post by TeMPOraL »

oblio wrote: post #190
TeMPOraL wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody started out with that conclusions. The tests and experiments and workshops and consulting with select employees you propose, were all done 2-3 years ago. Results are in, but a chunk of population decides to ignore them and obstinately continue believing and claiming that it doesn't work, which is a conclusion they started out with.

> Results are in Awesome, can you please share those results? Surely they would be all over Nature, Science, IEEE, etc.

Nature doesn't publish papers about water being wet either.

Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

#204

Post by marcta »

SR2Z wrote: post #46
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.

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 you look for sawdust? That's a waste product. You would motivate everyone to stop producing actual furniture, and just buy the biggest bits of wood to turn entirely into sawdust. Which is textbook Godhart's law.

This is what's happening here, you have people setting up two chatbots to churn useless tokens at each other, making only sawdust.

I contend that tokens per se are actually a waste product, or at least non-value add. The end user doesn't actually care how many tokens were used to make a thing. If you could get the same result with fewer tokens, that would be an improvement.

Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

#205

Post by rendaw »

IanCal wrote: post #196
rendaw wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is obviously wrong. Management has never cared about how engineers do their job. There's never been a push for any other productivity boosting technology: better languages, better editors, automated refactorings, paid code intelligence tools, etc. But suddenly AI comes along and the CEO says "all developers need to write code entirely with LLMs".

This is absolute nonsense. Management in many places cares enormously about productivity. What’s been a bit different here is a huge claim of improvement other companies are seeing (so you’re going to be left behind), alongside some developers going off and doing this anyway sending proprietary code hither and thither, alongside some devs railing against the very concept of using it. It’s also a wildly powerful tool…

I did not say that management doesn't care about productivity. To be clear though, I did mean to say upper management.

Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

#206

Post by philipallstar »

SR2Z wrote: post #46
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.

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…

> 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.

But to make this work, you cannot tell your workers that you are looking for sawdust, because you just gave them tools that make sawdust very easily.

Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

#207

Post by hnarn »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #149
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…

> The logic of buying the tools then forcing the employees to use them "or else" is completely backwards in any sane world People are stubborn. A lot of productivity improvements had to be almost forced upon farmers, for example. Even when early adopters demonstrated the benefits, a decent fraction of them just didn’t want to change.

> People are stubborn.

This is just a variant of the argument ”people don’t know what’s good for them”. You’re very close to the actual answer, which is that the aforementioned ”manager class” is simply convinced that they understand reality better than those below them, which is quite frankly absurd considering the fact that managers very rarely do any of the ”real work” that these tools supposedly make redundant, and yet they still believe themselves to understand the potential better.

Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

#208

Post by thousandflowers »

The thing that most disconcerts me isn't the runtime pruning, it's the cold loading. Months ago, I added a few skills and MCPs to test them, partly in the frenzy of free shopping, but then I forgot about half of them.

So after I got tired of choosing by hand, and therefore also a bit blindly, I created a small tool that runs locally and analyzes conversations to tell you which skills, MCPs, or other things are always unused.

347 items never used · ~19354 dead tokens/session · ~$25.49/month A lot of ECC that I never used but always loaded.

If anyone's interested, I've put it on GitHub, thousandflowers/skillreaper.

Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

#209

Post by sevenseacat »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #133
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? I run a small business with two employees. N=2 here, of course, but one of them will experiment with any new process you introduce (as well as plenty more that you don't!) The other will keep doing what he's always been doing, even if it's frustrating and inefficient, unless you monitor him and force him to u…

In my experience, your first dev will have four thousand ideas and experiments on the go, and leave an absolute mess in their wake.

And your second will be struggling to clean up that mess while also getting their own work done.

Of course, you expect the same level of work from both of them, but because person two has to do a bunch of person one's work as well as their own, person one ends up looking better and gets praised by management.

I'm totally not bitter at all.

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