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.

This is probably the most charitable explanation humanly possible.

Surely for this specific example of managerial stupidity it just is, but I mean more generally, it's a beautiful posting.

I aspire to have this much misplaced belief in any humans at all, let alone CEOs.

having heard the arguments made by some VP + C-levels throughout the Tokenmaxxing Tulip Mania, I think the interpretation that those mandates were made intentionally for "forcing employees to start leveraging AI in meaningful ways" is too charitable.

Most companies focused entirely on doing "what everyone else is doing" at best or "to see if Programmer Joe can be as productive as the entire team so we can fire the rest".

And many indeed fired employees in droves because they were "underperforming in token spend".

I remember a story on HN from a while back. The idea is that the larger the org, the simpler the message and the tool has to be to reach everyone. The comment author was saying that as a junior, his company implemented a "tokenmaxxing" scheme for A/B testing - more tests, better for performance review. He, back then, thought it was stupid. However, it got the desired outcome of everyone being familiar with what experiments are and how to run them.

> 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?

An interesting side effect of this spreading across social media is that even companies without token leaderboards were having problems with needless tokenmaxxing.

When everyone was reading about token leaderboards on all of their social media channels (include social news sites like Reddit and Hacker News) it created token anxiety even at companies that didn’t want a leaderboard. Programmers were afraid that their managers would be secretly ranking them based on token usage and they needed to pump up those numbers to avoid layoffs.

Once teams implemented token budgets in response it creates an ugly situation where a few people feel the need to use as many tokens as they can at the beginning of the budget window to stay ahead.

It’s really frustrating to have this phenomenon leak into a company that was never encouraging or looking for high token use.

People in small teams with managers promoted from within could probably have had this in mind.

Big Corporate managers are much more likely to have felt the need to “do AI” from their VPs, who in turn got it from the executive team, who have probably been under fire to produce a coherent magical AI strategy that makes to company scale infinitely while reducing costs. In that environment it’s much more likely to be copy-and-pasted charts from Gartner and buzzwords overheard at conferences, combined with the hope that somebody somewhere will eventually turn it all into something that resembles forward movement.

Yeah there's no way that was the reason. I judge it to be a combination of FOMO and the big tech companies needing to pump demand for compute.

> There's no need to overthink this.

I agree, but for a completely different reason. A lot of executives simply chase trends. This was another trend they copied from each other. No reason to imagine they carefully studied the issue.

That's a very good point. Our company has been very thrifty with our AI spend, until a few months ago the average employee had ~$50 of supported spend and I was trying to be an AI leader in the company and figure out what was and was not possible, I had a $100/mo spend (Claude $100 service costs $108/mo).

We are now seeing that Claude Code can do a LOT of heavy lifting in our day-to-day work, but the bulk of our employees are stuck cost-maxing and literally cannot "imagine how you are running into your session limits". "I'm fine with the $20/mo account."

There's a case for the cost-maxing has hurt our company.

This is an insane level of cope.

The whole tokenmaxxing thing started because Jensen Huang said insane things like having a single engineer spend 250k in tokens or he’d fire him; and that OpenClaw was basically AGI.

> No one is stupid enough to always measure performance based on token spend and have unlimited budget.

Yes the people forcing these mandates absolutely are this stupid because that’s what people like Jensen Huang, Peter Steinberger and Boris Cherney were touting. Seriously have you ever actually talked to an average C-Level about AI? They are absolutely cooked.

You’re the one that’s overthinking it.

The smart move would have been to get lower level managers to assign specific employees to experiment with applying LLMs to their processes and report back. Then incorpoate the findings into their processes.

Instead there was FOMO mass hysteria. Now there is a backlash. And a lot of time and money wasted.

You’re post rationalizating

Did they see productivity gains that they're now calibrating for? Why have these productivity gains not been reflected externally in any measurable way?

It really wasn't. It was a moronic move fueled by hype, implemented by the same type of incompetent business leaders who previously, to various extents, drank the blockchain and metaverse kool-aid.

There was demonstrably zero cost or consequence analysis, which is also why it was dialed back as soon as the (still) subsidized tokens became just slightly less subsidized, and the wise leaders realized they spent huge sums of money with no way of gauging ROI.

LLMs may have their use cases, but let's not make up free excuses for blithering idiots who, by any rights, should all be fired for cooking up money-burning policies that are textbook implementations of Goodhart's law.

Anyway, just needed to get that off my chest.

Its not _just_ that. Orgs aren't remotely sensible at measuring anything that isn't counted in dollars.

employees who are on the ai bandwagon are there for the free management attention.

Management is cooked because the damn market is hard, money is tight and they can't afford to fight the top down love and $$$ thrown at AI.

If you zoom out, all the real money spent on energy to keep AI alive isn't going to be held in nvidia stock for too long. it will burst, but its stupid to time it.

The problem is that managers have no idea how this is supposed to help either, and just get told from above to use AI.

It seems really absurd that anyone would encourage or even force employees to burn more money to see if maybe something works.

Independent of everything else, very interesting to see how polarized the comments are here

Did not read the twitter thread but I think it is a mix of some companies with above strategy and most others just cargo culting

Do you have a source for this?

> Tokenmaxxing was just a way to force employees to start leveraging AI in a meaningful way.

> It was always a temporary thing to transition the employees to a new world.

Trying to understand your justification for rejecting Hanlon’s razor.

might be the first time I've seen this reasonable and obviously correct interpretation of the last 6-12 months so directly and unapologetically stated. bravo

No one is stupid enough to always measure performance based on token spend and have unlimited budget.

Accenture was.

Thanks for posting the tweet, it was a very interesting read. A bit amusing knowing what's up with MS and Azure these days, but that's not the point!

An insane re-writing of the last year of bullshit insanity. Good one.

> Tokenmaxxing was just a way to force employees to start leveraging AI in a meaningful way.

Of course not. That is not what it achieved or could possibly achieve.

> Management felt like employees weren't leveraging AI fast enough.

I agree it was about their irrational feelings.

> 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.

You're naive, uninformed or turfing if you think companies are still not tokenmaxxing.

Also tokenmaxxing was never an intentional and smart strategy employed by companies like you say. It was a mix of fear of missing out, signaling to investors they were in on the hype and recouping investmenets in data centers

No. While what you’re saying makes sense, that’s not the logic behind the token max mentality. It’s simply lazy ineffective leaders who are bad at their jobs and don’t make rational decisions. They really did think spending more is somehow going to make their business better.

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.

> I was lucky enough to receive a weeklong $50k per head AI training

wow! That sounds like an unbelievable grift. Who were they such that anyone could possibly think that's a worthwhile investment?

The long live x is a lazy meme that draws attention that posters can use to skip thinking of an actual appropriate title.

that is a better title! Added it as a subheader

Loop "engineering" has now become a thing now apparently (a la prompt "engineering") https://github.com/topics/loop-engineering

> Just repeating the same prompt until you get the desired result?

Not necessarily the desired result, but until it's 'done', where the LLM itself is the judge on if the is the case according to the given criteria (often just an updated todo-list). One of those extremely simple 'harnesses' (if you can even call it that) was even named the 'Ralph Wiggum Loop' [1] to allude to the braindead-but-persistent tokenmaxxing it results in.

[1] https://awesomeclaude.ai/ralph-wiggum

> database servers are Swiss city names, web servers are Denmark, storage is Finland

consider me officially triggered

I'm also taken aback with how naive folks are about companies, they really seem to have bought the whole "capitalism is efficient" maxim hook, line, and sinker.

I really struggle to imagine how anyone in a corporate environment has managed to never run into obvious examples of waste like you describe (overpaid consultants and mandatory budgets are classic examples). Office Space came out 27 years ago and has a plotline making fun of overpaid "efficiency consultants" whose only job is to tell management to fire people.

To be fair leaders usually don't say that, they say a whole lot of nothing that means "We're gonna set money on fire because it makes me feel good."

Or more accurately, "Because this is good for my career."

Or like Meta spending $90 billion on "the metaverse" only to see 300,000 users at its peak.

That comes out to spending $300,000 per user.

(its in the article, which predicts that there will be another round of tokenmaxxing with different underlying incentives)

You're right, but you'd be lucky if a real human actually reviews any code. At my company, merging a PR still requires 2 humans to press "Approve" but I've been instructed that I don't need to read the PR, I only need to click "Approve". This is what 30 years of SWE experience is being used for now.

> Tokenmaxxing was never a thing to begin with.

Anecdote, I thought so too until the company I work just instated this where you have spend from 35-60K within 6 months. Insanity

Agreed. There is way too much noise made out of this from a handful of companies.

The issue is the companies doing it could spend billions on tokens and they have. I for one know that there are multiple Big Tech Fortune 500 companies that have burnt over 1B in tokens in a single quarter.

This is purely for coding and analogues.

‘“Thing is dead, long live thing” is all you need’ considered harmful

Phoenixing considered harmful

I do abuse this title format, guilty as charged

Your comment implies no ROI on spent tokens. I get a lot more work done tokenmaxxing so the cost is negligible to me but YMMV. Of course there's no point in tokenmaxxing if you don't have enough work available to scale beyond yourself, or you're unable to use AI to do so.

I predict startups will continue to tokenmaxx while 40,000+ person companies will become a little more conservative.