431–440 of 450 posts
I'd bet that the goal is for people to 'game' it though. By pushing people to use AI more they'll try it, experiment with it, 'waste' time on it ... and from that they'll learn about it. That's the end goal. They're using tokens for pointless stuff right now in order to figure out use cases where it helps. You can't do that without also learning where it doesn't help. My company is doing the same thing.
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We had a way of measuring velocity, but who cares about estimating stories when we could be spinning up more agents? Burn a bunch of tokens and those stories will be DONE before you could even find your planning poker cards!
I've lived through a bunch of initiatives about improving planning and estimation. None of them turned into a stable process that worked for anyone. I don't know if I can extrapolate from that, but it gives me an inclination that no one really trusts anything that comes out of task estimation. Which would be why we're looking for more objective metrics like token burn rate. No room for argument - tokens are tokens!
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This but unironically. The speed of generating code is now faster than the time it takes to plan and estimate how long it will take to generate the code.
Generating more code faster might be useful, but there have to be some other constraints on it. Using this paradigm, we can achieve unlimited bugs sooner than ever before. 1. To fix a bug, always add code, never remove. 2. Whenever you fix one bug, always introduce at least two new ones.
I was brought on to one particular team to do cleanup and all I was given was band-aids to layer on top.
Odds are good your local or state government is running this software right now for managing its courtrooms.
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You just compared this AI shift to "tractors on farms". Did tractors increase farming output by 20%?
The first tractors in 1911 or whatever probably did. 50 years on and it was many times that.
I suppose you could make the claim that the first things commonly called tractors (which were petrol-powered) might not have increased productivity very much, but "tractors on farms" should surely be read as the revolutionary moment, not the change in dominant fuel type 50 years later.
Also, it's likely not safe to read "20% increase in PRs" as "20% productivity improvement".
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Your last statement is exactly right. Communication matters most when you're dealing with cross-org concerns and those that master it are usually the more friendly and pleasant ones. This is something I wish more people understood. I even sometimes fall into the latter even though I strive for the former.
> Communication matters most when you're dealing with cross-org concerns and those that master it are usually the more friendly and pleasant ones. I don't agree with the second one, but agree with the first. Throughout my corporate career so far, I have found plenty of hot air/pretty picture slide decks that exist solely for ladder climbers to climb. Said ladder climbers are usually all smiles in public and "friendly…
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At my company we were told AI spend was part of perf review and that the "singularity" had happened. Now 20% of our infrastructure spend is tokens. The average number of pull requests per dev per week increased with all this spend. From 4.2 to 5.1. And that includes a huge chunk of PRs that are just agents changing a line or two in a config. It's all magical thinking
Since you're an idiot or fired if you point at this, just collect the money man. It's their money. They want to do stupid things? So be it.
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Fellow FAANG. We have weekly manager meetings where leadership encourages us to increase token usage. We do push back, and leadership acknowledges that token spend is not a great metric and people are likely to game it... and then go right back to encouraging us to increase token spend in our teams. We have token tracking dashboards that leadership is looking at. I know because they show us in these manager meetings.…
I do not want FAANG and FAANG does not want me. So, as a goblin, I must ask: how is your and your team's morale doing? People in FAANG likely worked hard to get in there or lucked out or some combination of both. I feel like my soul would be crushed if I hacked away at Leetcode for months on end just to babysit and gaslight some algorithm into asymptotically following my instructions.