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Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

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Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

#241

Post by [deleted] »

IanCal wrote: post #200
ryandrake wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Expectations shift, and tools do matter. Imagine you had a direct report. They were doing just fine, slightly better than a typical report. Then you found out they were writing all their code in notepad - no linting, no automated tests or live updates, no refactoring tools, no highlighting or any code search. They didn’t have any cross code searches and didn’t have any documentation. When they hit a problem, they’d c…

[deleted]

Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

#242

Post by ButlerianJihad »

liquicity wrote: post #225
et1337 wrote: post #77

Folks have been saying “things are different now, the agents are now compounding success instead of error” for at least a year now, but I just don’t see it. I was lucky enough to receive a weeklong $50k per head AI training from the people saying these things, and one of their few helpful concrete recommendations was to constantly clear context all the time, to avoid things going off the rails. However, I think findi…

50k per head training and the largest takeaway was to clear context.. that is the "hello world" of using agents, insane.

Have you tried turning it off, and then turning it back on again?

Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

#243

Post by foota »

RugnirViking wrote: post #227
jdiff wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even modern frontier models benefit so hugely from careful context pruning, maintenance, and rewriting to erase mistakes that it's astonishing to me that there are no tools centered around it. The one tool that used to have such a feature, Zed and its retroactively-named Text Threads, has now stripped itself of it.

this! the back-and-forth chat interface where you can edit only your own messages, and only then to get a new response, is a terrible one, but I think favored by vendors because it helps them fight in vain against prompt injection. Custom harnesses and stuff are nice but incredibly time consuming to set up when all I want to do is like, see what the agent is reading, and editing out some irelevant nonsense side quest…

No reason other than you're giving user's a cost footgun? That's a pretty good reason.

Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

#244

Post by oblio »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #234
oblio wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs are useful. They're not "3-4 trillion dollars in investments over 5 years" useful, nor "crammed into the throat of every employee on the planet, regardless of their actual job" useful. The way they are pushed right now will lead to a very hard crash and probably lots of suffering. Also, you need a more advanced prompt for Firefox on Android :-p

> They're not "3-4 trillion dollars in investments over 5 years" useful Why not? They're a general-purpose technology, in the same category as "software" or "electricity". > nor "crammed into the throat of every employee on the planet, regardless of their actual job" useful They're potentially useful for anything that can be fed into computers (VLMs lifted the "that can be expressed as text" limitation, visual and au…

LOL, it did work :-)

Regarding LLMs, they are pushed too hard and too abusively by business people. Employees are being laid off and replaced with chatbots that don't do the job. Frustrating if support for McDonald's, risky if health insurance support. Also the financials don't make sense. AI companies are money pits. Money is ultimately production. We make X amount of stuff yearly, globally. We can't afford to through away 5% of X yearly on technologies that will probably have a proper return in 5 or 10 years. When we mis-allocate resources on scales like these, people die. Look at Communist centralized planning. For $3-4 trillion we could have solved a LOT of actual global problems.

LLMs are fine but they should have matured in the software dev domain for 2-3 more years and then non tech products would have followed.

Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

#245

Post by denkmoon »

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.

Without a doubt this too will be overbuilt. At least we’ll have cheap second hand DC gpus in however many years.

Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

#246

Post by nneonneo »

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…

You may want to consider that your Group B employee may be conscientious and reliable because they use an apparently “frustrating and inefficient” process. Productive friction is a thing: processes which force you to slow down enough to put careful thought into what you’re doing and why. And if they’re stuck in a loop of doing frustrating work - you may well consider why they’re doing so much frustrating work. Maybe that can be resolved at the managerial level!

Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

#247

Post by lunar_mycroft »

IanCal wrote: post #200
ryandrake wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Expectations shift, and tools do matter. Imagine you had a direct report. They were doing just fine, slightly better than a typical report. Then you found out they were writing all their code in notepad - no linting, no automated tests or live updates, no refactoring tools, no highlighting or any code search. They didn’t have any cross code searches and didn’t have any documentation. When they hit a problem, they’d c…

It's funny, because editor choice is also an analogy I use, to argue for the exact opposite conclusion.

Your hypothetical developer wouldn't be using notepad because they're unaware of other editors, they'd be using it because they evaluated other editors and concluded that, for whatever reason, they would be worse for them. I'd be fascinated to hear why they came to that conclusion, but I'm not going to tell them they're wrong if they're performing acceptably, aren't constantly breaking CI because the linter rejects their code, etc. Everyone is different, and I'm not narcissistic enough to think the fact that I would be way less productive without my modal editor, LSP, linter, terminal multiplexer, etc. justifies forcing everyone else has to adopt my exact setup.

Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

#248

Post by olex »

liquicity wrote: post #225
et1337 wrote: post #77

Folks have been saying “things are different now, the agents are now compounding success instead of error” for at least a year now, but I just don’t see it. I was lucky enough to receive a weeklong $50k per head AI training from the people saying these things, and one of their few helpful concrete recommendations was to constantly clear context all the time, to avoid things going off the rails. However, I think findi…

50k per head training and the largest takeaway was to clear context.. that is the "hello world" of using agents, insane.

Some companies only get to a "hello world" level with a new kind of tech via a 50k per head training. The organizations are setup in a way that people can't experiment or learn by themselves, it's really the only way.

Re: Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing

#250

Post by noodletheworld »

manicennui wrote: post #240
ambicapter wrote: post #131

> That’s no longer true. We’ve entered a different regime, where spending more tokens generally results in better results. We call this “compounding correctness” — the more tokens you spend on getting a task correct, the more likely you’ll get a good outcome. We talked about this a bit at the last in person Agentics meetup: Have we? Is it generally the case that the more tokens you spend, you better results you get?…

Did you read the article? "Most teams haven’t yet figured out how to build their own Ramp Inspect or Stripe Minions (if that’s you, reach out — we can help!) but basically everyone is at least using cursor in the side bar."

? What is your point? That the OP is obviously finically motived to encourage tokenmaxing?

Here’s what they said, $$$ aside:

> That’s no longer true. We’ve entered a different regime, where spending more tokens generally results in better results. We call this “compounding correctness” — the more tokens you spend on getting a task correct

> Compounding correctness flips the calculus. If more token spend leads to better outcomes, then you’re going to want to spend a lot of time running tokens. Which sure as hell sounds like tokenmaxxing to me! The original incentives to tokenmax are gone, but eventually folks will realize that a new and more powerful incentive has take its place.

> There were ways to get loops to work, but it was hard. You had to think a lot about how to prompt the agent, which in turn required a pretty deep familiarity with how these things work.

> Now, though, it’s easy. Compounding correctness makes it easy

Go on, tell me I’m quoting the OP out of context.

It’s pretty clear this person believes in compounding correctness, while other, more serious people (1) are perhaps more skeptical.

..and Armins company owns pi. You can’t get much more all in on AI.

Compounding correctness sounds cool, but the real examples of people spending lots of tokens are not compounding correctness; they are wide parallel exploration; like Mythos. The OP is confused, and wrong; they’ve made some basic (flawed) assumptions, and based their entire reasoning on them.

…and are selling AI things. How surprising.

[1] - https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/6/23/the-coming-loop/

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