121–130 of 162 posts
I’d be curious to see the breakdown on spending by use case. I’ve heard it said that the majority of tokenmaxing comes from none technical uses like reading PDFs, creating PowerPoints, generating graphics/images… ect. But I’ve never heard any actual proof to that.
Using AI to suddenly deliver massive amounts of code without questioning the requirements
"The leaderboard, which ranked employees and teams by token consumption, inadvertently incentivized usage volume over productive output." Who could possibly have predicted that happening?
"The leaderboard, which ranked employees and teams by token consumption, inadvertently incentivized usage volume over productive output." Who could possibly have predicted that happening?
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…
It's surprising how often this principle is applicable.
And I still can't exhaust the limits on my Claude Max subscription, despite being more productive than I've ever been in terms of real work (ie, things that actually make money)
For real. I've used 8B tokens in the past month and haven't hit my limits even once. In fact, I can't even get close except for the day I used Fable. I've barely stopped. Claude keeps reminding me to sleep.
And I still can't exhaust the limits on my Claude Max subscription, despite being more productive than I've ever been in terms of real work (ie, things that actually make money)
Enjoy it while you can, because it won’t last forever. Per-token billing is quite eye opening in terms of how much it can cost
Wasn’t this already reported on? FWIW this article links to primary sources from early last month https://www.theinformation.com/articles/tokenminimizing-meta...
It's stories like this that really dispell the genius/merit theory of successful business. The best you can say about Zuck is he didn't prevent Facebook from becoming huge.
measure outcomes (impact), not effort (token usage, lines of code, code coverage, hours worked, etc.)
Okay. How? This is an org pushing thousands of PRs a day. How do you solve the attribution problem for any one engineer's work given some set of impact metrics? And keep in mind, most common impact metrics are trailing indicators, often over relative long time horizons.
Instead, I had a career ladder with a detailed rubric describing the skills an engineer at each level was expected to have. (Including communication and peer-leadership skills.)
Managers performed qualitative assessment of employees, using the career ladder as a guide. They relied on tech leads and Staff engineers to help them understand people’s skills, and provided 1:1 feedback and coaching.
We did use impact-based metrics to assess the results of important initiatives. We solved the attribution and lagging indicator problems by estimating impact rather than measuring it, and using a series of proxy measurements (activation, usage, retention, etc.) as a feedback mechanism for revising those estimates.
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.
And they can't afford a few extra billion that their engineers can utilize right now?
Looks like AI as it develops is intended to be too expensive for regular people in the long run, but if Meta can't even afford it at that rate, who can?
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
I agree with you, but every non-engineer I know using these tools 100% will drag and drop a PDF into a chatbot. Anthropic and OpenAI as companies who are selling their products to all sorts of businesses should have a much better means of handling this nightmare of a format because it is so pervasive and so obviously what so many of their customers are going to drop into the product.
For the same reason as why the oil companies want everyone to use large cars.