Meta caps internal AI token spending • Hacker News Board

Re: Meta caps internal AI token spending

#61

Post by ryanschaefer » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 1:41 AM UTC

simonw wrote: post #3

"The leaderboard, which ranked employees and teams by token consumption, inadvertently incentivized usage volume over productive output." Who could possibly have predicted that happening?

It’s funny how many times the same thing happens at each large company. I think people’s thought process is this:

> Oh wow! If I paid for this myself I would have spent a lot of money! Are other people spending as much as me? I’m going to create a leaderboard!

> Oh no, my misinformed manager is using the leaderboard as a slight of hand for work. I need to game this now.

Then the leaderboard is banned… I can’t see how this ever really goes up the chain beyond director.

Re: Meta caps internal AI token spending

#62

Post by gtowey » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 1:42 AM UTC

VygmraMGVl wrote: post #22

qwertytyyuu wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know right? What did the leadership think would happen when they give some of the worlds greatest software engineers (supportably), a easily quantifiable metric to target?

The leaderboard wasn't leadership generated, it was engineer generated from internally available data. The leadership target is "impact" from ai tools.

What a wonderful scapegoat! Technically it's all "engineer created" because the managers generally don't do technical work. I bet many managers pushed their reports to increase their usage during their 1:1 meetings based on data from the leaderboard. If management had any sense that it was a bad metric, they had ample time to get ahead of it and take it down and provide appropriate guidance. Instead, predictably, they waited until it was a full on disaster and a crisis before acting.

Re: Meta caps internal AI token spending

#63

Post by spindump8930 » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 1:42 AM UTC

tyre wrote: post #51

mattnewton wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because PDFs are a nightmare of a format and the only thing that’s is reasonably guaranteed about them is they will render to an image that people can read, the parsing of which will be much less token efficient than the equivalent text

For anyone needing to do this, the answer is to convert it to an image first. Far smaller, LLMs work well with them (even in some pretty insane use cases I've seen), and, along with human review, it can be a huge productivity gain that results in structured data.

I agree with your recomendation, but converting a pdf to an image is by no means smaller. PDFs are much closer to SVGs then to jpegs.

Re: Meta caps internal AI token spending

#64

Post by estearum » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 1:44 AM UTC

4yfr wrote: post #38

Loughla wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to realize that if you set a measure, you're actually setting a goal for your employees. There is no such thing as a meaningless metric; why else would you measure it? No amount of "this isn't used for anything" will change that. It's inherent in human nature in the 21st century to believe any and all metrics will be used against them, and therefore must be gamed. It's why you also have to set UNBELIEVABLY c…

Kinda. The answer is simpler on the surface: focus. Generally the problem is the larger the firm’s operations, the harder it is to focus. Apple is the only firm that has done well on this consistently and doesn’t have a huge grave yard of failures to show for it.

Are you saying what people are hoping to achieve with stupid goals? Because yeah, obviously. But the point is that they're stupid, so they don't achieve that, and that failure is 100% knowable in most scenarios.

Re: Meta caps internal AI token spending

#65

Post by d4rkp4ttern » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 1:44 AM UTC

Ok I’ll ask since nobody else has — are they not giving their devs a Claude code max or Codex Pro subscription? If so, why is token cost approaching billions? And if not, why not?

Re: Meta caps internal AI token spending

#66

Post by lokar » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 1:46 AM UTC

andsoitis wrote: post #12

measure outcomes (impact), not effort (token usage, lines of code, code coverage, hours worked, etc.)

The whole phenomenon of metric based Eng evaluations is because leadership does not trust line managers to evaluate individual engineers.

Re: Meta caps internal AI token spending

#67

Post by 542458 » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 1:46 AM UTC

d4rkp4ttern wrote: post #65

Ok I’ll ask since nobody else has — are they not giving their devs a Claude code max or Codex Pro subscription? If so, why is token cost approaching billions? And if not, why not?

Enterprise customers don’t get those plans, at the enterprise level you have to pay by the API rate… so people don’t have limited use, but you’re also not getting the heavily discounted rate the “normal” plans are at.

Re: Meta caps internal AI token spending

#68

Post by onetokeoverthe » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 1:46 AM UTC

morpheos137 wrote: post #58

Aurornis wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A past employer thought it was a good idea to put up a leaderboard of who sent the most Slack messages. They celebrated the people at the top for being so active. Predictably, everyone started talking in Slack like their jobs depended on it. Everyone was responding to everything. Instead of writing out a complete message and pressing enter, they'd send each fragment of the sentence as a new line. The Slack leaderboar…

What is about silicon valley leaders not understanding basic economics or business management? These kind of cargo cult tactics would not fly in any other industry.

[dead]

Re: Meta caps internal AI token spending

#69

Post by janalsncm » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 1:46 AM UTC

wpasc wrote: post #21

4yfr wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What outcomes though? The ones I’ve seen posted are still nonsensical metrics that a publicly traded firm absolutely doesn’t care about. It wants to see faster R&D, higher revenues from existing assets, greater operating margins, higher sales to invested capital ratio and so on… The best way to measure that for a software firm is up-time of services, usage and project completion duration

measuring uptime? I've seen Anthropic's status page, and they are a >$1 Trillion dollar company who "largely solved" coding. so clearly you aren't correct. /s

Ok, uptime. How do you measure an individual’s contribution to uptime? If Claude goes down does everyone take a hit? If Claude stays up everyone gets rewarded?

If so, your metric cannot distinguish between a bad engineer and a good one.

If not, you have the same problem you started with: measuring contributions to “uptime”.

Re: Meta caps internal AI token spending

#70

Post by jazzyjackson » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 1:46 AM UTC

tyre wrote: post #56

Trasmatta wrote: post #28

All those billions spent on tokens by Meta, and not a single iota of value generated by any of it

I love how confidently you say this, with no evidence provided (and I doubt you have any.) Just a pristine comment section yap.

If there was a positive return on token spend they wouldn’t be capping it now would they?