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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

Not just Amazon, too. It feels like all of big tech (and some smaller firms) have simultaneously gone insane. Imagine if your CEO woke up one day and told the company: "We need to encourage travel spending. Please book as many business trips as you can, and spend as much money as possible. Fly first class to our satellite offices! Take limos instead of Ubers! Eat at fine restaurants! Make sure you are constantly traveling. In fact, we are going to make Travel Spending part of your annual performance review: If you don't spend enough on business travel, you'll get a low rating!"

We are living in a totally bonkers time.

View on HN

This is what inspired me to build my new CLI tool, Burn, Baby, Burn (https://github.com/dtnewman/burn-baby-burn/tree/main).

(If you are a VP at Amazon, yes, I'll consider acquisition offers. I'm also working on an enterprise version of this with additional features.)

Show HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48151287

Just sent it to some developers who could really benefit from this! Please let us know when you have Codex and Gemini versions ready to rumble.

Sorry, it will be a while. We're currently building out enterprise features like SSO/SAML support, role based burn access, and a carbon offset marketplace. As you can imagine, we're burning a lot of tokens to get these out, but actual productivity isn't up as much as you'd think.

How about a built-in AI assistant to answer my burning questions?

I want a in-browser Gemini version. For some reason my company doesn't count Gemini CLI use. I guess I'm supposed to copy code between my browser and my editor.

Brilliant

Like attack ships off the shoulder of Orion, the only way to burn!

Only problem with this is that outcome metrics are still jira storypoints. Burning huge number of token while not improving the velocity is going to get you fired.

If we had a way of measuring velocity, we'd already be using that instead of tokens.

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!

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

A token is approximately word generated by a LLM; a few dozen tokens gets you a line of code... so measuring token burn rate is the same as counting lines of code. All it took was a change of name, and we're back to the most primitive metric we ever got for measuring programmer productivity.

I don't think I can take anything from management in tech seriously again after tokenmaxxing.

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.

This sounds like government software, in my experience.

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.

What do you mean? You get story points for free with jira. That’s like the one metric every place uses.

Story points are unicorn dust that crumbles under any attempt of serious optimization. The fundamental problem is that SP is not an objectively defined metric. If we come under serious pressure to improve velocity measured by SP, there's nothing to stop that initiative from trickling down into the SP estimation/measurement. SP works fine as long as you don't look too closely at it.

Yeah everything is subjective unicorn dust but there are ways of making sure story points have some semblance of accuracy. Either ways it’s probably the best metric we have atleast for an established team.

Next feature is creating stories. Double burn.

any plans for a distributed deployment via cloudflare works. I'm not sure this thing is powerful enough for my use case.

Yeah, lots of enterprise features in the works, but first i need to raise money at a $1B+ valuation (this might seem high for a project that started 4 hours ago, but it's actually very low for the project that will soon be the #1 consumer of tokens on the planet)

recommend you extrapolate your value based on the token spend rates of FAANG; if you can spend 10x FAANG, then you should get atleast 10x valuation. godspeed.

You got four hours of Claude Code usage without hitting a rate limit???

Won't the company audit the requests to AI and see you're sending a bunch of BS?

If only Scott Adams were alive to write Dilbert comics about this.

> Won't the company audit the requests to AI and see you're sending a bunch of BS?

Shouldn't be too hard to game. Version 2 uses the M365 MCP server to load up your email and iterate over all the messages, summarizing them over an over.

Do you have an example of any company ever doing this?

No, but if you run this non judiciously and burn 100x the next guy with no output, maybe they would want to know how

AI-powered cobra breeding tool.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive

This is hilarious and utter genius.

I know some that was told to try and use AI more on the job so they created some agent to just burn tokens and ended up using about 10x what the next highest employee used. Buddy expected to get shit but instead got an accolade and was asked to give a short talk to the other employees about how they could match their success.

i call BS on this story

I call AI on this comment

why?

Imitating your own utter lack of explanation or evidence?

I don’t.

Things that rhyme with this have indeed been happening at the biggest names.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

>This article is about statistics and government policy. For Nazi analogies in internet discussions, see Godwin's law.

I have seen similar at my company so it is highly plausible.

If you've never seen this level of perverse incentive, you have been lucky. The creation of and subsequent exploitation of them aren't new. For pre computer examples: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-cobra-effect-2/

The worse example I know is the time the Belgians forced the Congolese to harvest more rubber by cutting their hands if they haven't reached the correct quota, ensuing a cross-tribe hands trading economy

> cross-tribe hands trading

sounds like they had some cross cutting concerns

</dad>

Belgians had nothing to do with that, nor the then governement

The king had a side biz

Similar to the British in India, it was first controlled by some kind of company that benefitted the host country by extracting resources, and later on the host country took control. Belgium took control of Congo in 1908

It was literally the king that wanted it as personal venture. Belgium took over because he was very/too bad ( you're right that the governement was involved, I stand corrected).

Healthcare and infrastructure was then build too, but the relation was already scarred and well, it's not easy to reset everything.

I can't find the reference right now, but I remember reading literature about studies done at large programming organizations (like IBM, government) who used LOCs as a performance metric. Programmers could earn more money by including more lines of code in their work. This went exactly the way you'd expect.

Edit: I think it may have been from Capers Jones's _Programming Productivity_[1]. Published in 1986, based on research covering the prior 30 years(!) or so. We have known that bad incentives specifically distort the performance of programming teams for a long time.

1 - https://archive.org/details/programmingprodu0000jone/page/n1...

And then there was Bill Atkinson.

https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html

While it is good story for illustrating perverse incentives, there is no good historical evidence that the cobra bounty program actually existed.

I call unintended consequences on this KPI culture

They polished the turd more than stating, but the bones are real.

I believe it

In my first job ever, I used to get my work done on time and leave. There were a few people who’d stay in the office until late and show up on weekends. Same output, but they got the promotions and my bonus got prorated.

This is the same thing.

At least this one doesn't require spending the manhours moving dung from pocket to pocket, now we finally get credit for automating it!

While output may have been part of it. It's possible that by staying later (and working longer), they had better relationships with upper management.

"I used to get my work done on time and leave"

This sounds like you just wanted to get your work done and not foster any work relationships. This is fine, but you will not get promoted this way (as you've seen).

Moving up in a company is 30% work and 70% networking/being likelable/noticed.

I stopped that nonsense years ago. I work for myself now as a consultant. If I work more, I get paid more.

I took a job with the state I live in recently because friends were promoted over competent employees (not even counting myself in that because they were just promoted to my level). New job is fully remote and has a clear path to advancement based on clear work based metrics.

While it may be true that it's pretty standard, I'm convinced that any organization that relies more on face time and friendships than on actual skill is absolutely toxic.

It’s also a workplace whose success is in the past and has started the glide down into lower profits, revenue and wages.

Moving up is 100% being likeable.

Yes, with the caveat that the 30% work allocation counts toward likability. You can be friendly, charming, well-spoken, fun, etc., but if you fail to deliver and make work for other people, cause your coworkers frustration, and make your manager look bad, you're not going to move up. You will be able to coast for a while though, as managers have a hard time firing people they personally like.

It's ultimately a combination. A pretty good software developer who is friendly and pleasant is, in most organizations, going to get promoted over the grumbling angry software developer who is brilliant but everyone hates talking to. A lot of this has to do with most work at more senior levels being communication.

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", but you have to watch out for knives behind your back.

At that level it's all Hunger Games isn't it?

Likability helps you move up, competency keeps you there. The role of Likability in moving up is overstated.

Really? Because I've met a lot of incompetent "leaders" that failed upwards because of their likeability.

You just described a bad management - the one that favors butt in seat and rewards lack of outside life over actual benefits to company.

You’re assuming a lot here. Getting your work done on time and leaving doesn’t equate to not being likable. If it was a popularity contest, I would’ve been around the same as the people who were pretend working, if not more. My partner and my director wrote me a recommendation letter before I left, which I wouldn’t attribute to something they’d do if I was a nobody.

There are other reasons why the bad behavior gets rewarded. If the management is incompetent, they genuinely focus on the optics and not on the actual work. And if they are competent, they understand that the people who stay behind unnecessarily or come over the weekends are more exploitable in the long run. And if the people in management are the kind of people who stay behind unnecessarily, having a team full of people who do the same, rewards them as well.

That’s the part I don’t get: Engineers are smart enough to ask an LLM to ask other LLMs to ask other LLMs to load the policy manual then count the R’s in “LLM fork bomb”.

Additional story points completed per week, versus token-dollar spent, or some such combo would seem more sane.

But maybe they aren’t really tracking productivity, so tracking tokens is all they have? … I dunno which part of that is dumber.

We never figured out how to track productivity anyway. Only macro-level success in achieving measurable goals. Any AI metric besides "are similar goals being met more quickly" is people encouraging specific behaviors decided a priori.

We need an Office Space 2 just about AI shenanigans.

office space 2... i need this injected into my veins right now lol

The AI problems are still the same problems.

> We need to talk about your flair

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

Wow, the Singularity happened and nobody bothered to tell me about it?! Vernor Vinge and I.J. Good must be rolling in their graves fast enough to rip a hole in spacetime. Allow me to coin a term for this: Singflation.

Cory Doctorow recently published a history book on the topic [0]. Sorry you were left out. I am merely qubits floating in the void. Just finished reading Shakespeare's First Folio translated into Catalan for the tenth time. Wondering what to do next

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rapture_of_the_Nerds

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.

It is not their money though. It is the stock owners' so they don't care either.

> The average number of pull requests per dev per week increased with all this spend. From 4.2 to 5.1.

That's it? I've seen people that are consistently putting out four PRs per day. I don't/can't even code review them. So much of what we do is now just rubber-stamping PRs. We were even told that we shouldn't be writing code by hand anymore.

My main problem putting out that many PRs per day is getting them approved and merged back into main so I can start the next one.

I guess “stacked” PRs are a thing now? I haven’t figured out the process that avoids making the merges for stacked PRs a complete mess, though.

It's definitely not. It's a fundamental shift on how we interact with computers.

It's a tractors on farms kind of moment.

Agreed, people confuse the (totally expected) bumps and bruises of early adoption with somehow equating to "this technology is useless."

The Wright Brothers couldn't cross the Atlantic in their first flier and plenty of subsequent designs crashed and burned (literally). But now air travel is commonplace. Same will happen with AI, we just have to get past these early pains.

Bad analogy. Horses were the automagic being replaced.

I brought data to this discussion. What did you bring?

Your data shows a 20% improvement. That's $20-100k a year depending on how much devs are paid.

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.

No, at least not if you're talking about tractors broadly. The first practical traction engines (~1860) were pretty much instantly revolutionary.

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".

They dont show that. They show 20% more PR. That is not the same as 20% more productivity.

You don't get paid 20% more for achieving 20% more achievement, that's for sure.

It's not remotely comparable to tractors. Tractors actually do their job correctly and consistently.

My dad worked at a company that had their own travel agency (early 90s when you needed a travel agent for reasons that no longer apply), and he was often booked on the more expensive flight because the travel agency made more money. More than once he could have got first class for less on a different flight but company policy didn't allow him to fly first class.

We have always been living in bonkers time.

Most big companies still have travel agencies/companies manage their corporate travel. I can’t remember who we used when I was at Amazon, but I made a similar complaint to my manager once given I could fly cheaper in a higher class on a different airline (also one I had heaps of points with so I would have preferred it because I’d be able to upgrade further and/or use the lounge).

Turns out the price I saw in the booking portal isn’t actually what Amazon paid. It’s kinda more like a rack rate listing. But then there’s all kinds of discounting/cash back that happens on the backend based on the amount of travel booked each month.

I used to know someone whose parent worked at travel agency (also 90s) and their whole immediate family could book trips wherever, but only economy class.

I worked at a tech company in the early 2010s that had its own travel agency.

We have always been living in the Dilbert and/or Office Space universe.

> It feels like all of big tech (and some smaller firms) have simultaneously gone insane.

Some companies might just have been scammed by the marketing that told them that AI would make all their employees 10,000x more productive and save them billions and when that didn't happen the assumption was that it's because employees weren't using the magical AI as often as they should be.

Other companies, especially those working on their own AI products, might want employees to use AI as much as possible because they hope it will provide them with the training data they'll need to eventually replace most or all of those employees with the AI. Punishing workers who refuse to train their AI replacement might make sense to them because even though it's costly right now they expect the savings down the road to be much much greater.

Exactly this.

And the fact that it is an industry-wide meme at this point makes bright red flashing lights and klaxons go off on my mind that a catastrophic reckoning can't be too far. There's not enough money in the world to keep this up for too long.

You'd be surprised...

I worked for an international (mothership in the UK, later acquired by the US) company, which had... sort of a similar policy.

So, the (mothership) company acquired a lot of satellite companies, all in banking business. All over the world. Then they figured their CEO was corrupt, got in problems with the law, got kicked out. While they were waiting for the new "real" CEO to step in, they let some "interim" CEO to take his place.

New new (interim) CEO didn't seem to have a clue about the business she was supposed to run, nor did she care. She knew her time was running out, and she figured she'd spend it traveling the world and partaking in fine dining in every corner of the world the company's tentacle could reach. But, to make it seem more plausible, she, sort of, created a policy of "experience exchange", which sent random troupes of select individuals from different branches of the company to "exchange experience" with another similarly randomly assembled troupe. Of course, the company picked the bill when it comes to lodging and dining.

Our inconsequential branch in Israel saw a pilgrimage of high-ranking banking managers from all over the world, but, mostly the wealthier parts of it. Some didn't even bother to show up in the office though, and proceeded straight to the banquet hall of the most expensive hotel on the Tel Aviv beach.

To be fair though, the interim CEO got the boot even before her time was supposed to end, but it was serendipitously close to the acquisition by the US company, and so she was let go as part of a "restructuring" and "optimization"... but it was a crazy year!

You mean like using lines of code as a metric to rank engineers [1]?

Managers love metrics. Bad managers particularly love metrics. Tokens used was almost the obvious bad metric that was going to be used.

I would argue that tokens used has actually exposed a useful metric: any manager who focused on this, demanded this or ranked based on this should be fired, for being a bad manager.

[1]: https://evan-soohoo.medium.com/did-elon-musk-really-fire-peo...

In many many many cases it's not the manager choosing to do that. Its our brilliant job creator class demanding that he does

Bad manager: "I have to give you a bad rating because of the company-wide LoC metric."

Good manager (to good engineer): "can you please churn some code to update your LoC metric so I don't have to give you a worse rating?"

I'm sorry but any manager who just claims they're a passive victim of company-wide mandates is a lazy and bad manager.

Bullshit work, in other words.

LoC can occasionally give you signal. For instance, imagine you are joining a new team or company so you don't know how much oversight your predecessor did. If you ask an engineer how they spend most of their time and they say "Mostly just writing code" and you look at GitHub and it says they've made 3 minor commits in the past quarter, that person is lying and your predecessor was incompetent (quite possibly both of them have been MIA from their responsibilities for months).

No, I'm not talking about the engineer who can point to significant contributions outside of code: writing technical specs, leading architecture discussions, etc. I'm talking about the ones who just say they're just coding, but are actually not working at all.

TL;DR LoC and commit count etc can be used only to flag for review likely cases of quiet quitting.

Bragging about token usage is like bragging about LoC written.

Obligatory:

Negative 2000 Lines of Code

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44381252

Versus my sibling comment to yours, I actually sent that to some internal folks after the bit about AI+total lines committed was said.

was there any kind of response or reaction to that? it’s something i would have done and probably wouldn’t have gone well. xD

I didn't send it very high up the chain (and was looking for a job at the time anyhow) but mostly got back snickers from peers and an "I know, but this is a directive from above"

I’m surprised that lines removed isn’t something your bosses at the time weren’t also advocating for, TBH. I don’t blame you for looking around.

Timeless classic.

When I was at Amazon last year, the bragging (from the AI poo-bah in my section of Amazon, note) about AI included "look at the total line count of commits from the heaviest AI users!"

So if AI screws something up and re-writes it and then screws it up again, needing another re-write, that counted as more positive than if it was done correctly, and simply, the first time.

This is like when the Pointy Haired Boss offers a bounty for fixing bugs and Wally pumps his fist and says “I’m gonna go code myself a Porsche!”

It is almost as if Dilbert was a documentary.

It’s honestly 10x worse than LOC. At least in the human era LOC had correlation to shipping features.

It’s more like bragging about compiler cycles spent.

I don't know where you're working but LLM enhanced development has skyrocketed our rate of feature development. As an example, a project roadmapped to take 7 months was delivered in only 4.5 because of CC/Codex.

I'm confused how anyone could believe it isn't an enhancer, unless they have refused to use any of the technologies.

You're measuring success with time to delivery, that's a reasonable metric. Same with volume of features shipped. Also good. LoC or tokens burned... not so much.

Yeah I’ve experienced much the same as you. Like it’s overwhelmingly clear from everything it’s enabled for us that we’re going far, far faster than we ever have, and the guardrails we have in play have helped guard the architecture and make it even harder to commit a bad PR. Sometimes in reading these comments I’m left wondering what sorts of experiences people are having elsewhere that’s left them this soured on its usage in business.

Everyone is replying but nobody is reading.

Moving faster doesn’t necessarily mean delivering business value faster. You may be moving faster in the wrong direction.

More code doesn’t necessarily mean delivering more business value. You’re piling on debt and if that debt is growing faster than the value of the code, you’re actually losing.

And even if you somehow are delivering more, better code, faster, and without building technical debt: writing code is somewhere around 1-5% of the actual work and time that it takes to deliver a software product. At least in all the places I’ve ever worked. You are optimizing the wrong thing.

You might want to read my earlier comment in the overall thread re: delivering business value and moving the needle features while still building with solid architectural principles. As I mentioned above, the AI stuff - with the rails I’ve put in to guide it - has actually lessened tech debt introduced, not made it worse.

I’m well aware of what you’re saying, but we are definitively moving faster in the correct direction. If this hasn’t been the case for where you’ve worked, my sympathies!

I can confirm it's an enhancement in writing code specifically. We've been actively using CC in our company for more than 6 months already.

Notably, the product itself isn't really better for users. And almost everything else apart coding now takes the bigger percentage of time. So as devs we could either just fuck around and refactor endlessly, or chill out and "complete the sprint in 30% of time". It was known for a long time that churning out code is not the bottleneck.

Even as a very happy NVDA shareholder I agree with you. It's comical that managers are being so naïve as to think that you can crap out a dashboard of "tokens consumed per week" and get any useful signal at all from it, beyond learning who's not using AI.

Incompetent use of a coding agent, or just general shenanigans, can burn tokens all day but it's not going to get tickets done.

Just looking at the work output - how many story points, tickets, how many new bugs are opened, etc. has not become any less relevant a metric for productivity with AI. If you're a skilled and proper user of AI those numbers would be changing in the right direction, compared to before you had it.

All those numbers are equally gameable and terrible metrics for productivity. With any of those, as with AI spending, you've got to look at actual results qualitatively. There's no shortcut.

The eternal evergreen lesson of managing software developers, and knowledge workers more generally.

> It's comical that managers are being so naïve as to think that you can crap out a dashboard of "tokens consumed per week" and get any useful signal at all from it, beyond learning who's not using AI.

If some guy decides to spend a bunch of money bringing AI tools into the company things might get very uncomfortable for him if they're seeing zero return on that investment. He's sure not going to get recognition and a massive bonus for it. If on the other hand, he can put some numbers in a spreadsheet or powerpoint showing that employees are using AI all the time and profits are up again this quarter, maybe he can take some credit for that or at least keep his boss or the company's shareholders from questioning the wisdom of dumping so much cash into those AI products.

  > things might get very uncomfortable for him if they're seeing zero return on that investment. 

  > If on the other hand, he can put some numbers in a spreadsheet or powerpoint showing that employees are using AI all the time and profits are up again this quarter

thats exactly what i see first-hand; no actual measure of dollars in vs dollars out, just x number of employees are generating y number of pr's with z% ai code + this quarter we made a profit = ai productivity boost...

total brainrot

> just x number of employees are generating y number of pr's with z% ai code + this quarter we made a profit = ai productivity boost...

TBH, if x,y, and z led to your company making an increase in profits over the quarter (im not saying it did, just that your recounting of it implies the connection was made), then it pretty much did its job. The last one is a more than meaningful metric for bosses, companies, and shareholders =)

The point is that kind of lazy accounting isn't really showing that the profit increase wouldn't have happened without AI. It may even be the case that profits would have been better without the cost and use of AI, or even that by generating a bunch of AI slop they're accumulating costly technical debt they'll eventually have to dig themselves out of.

We've already seen companies admitting that they aren't seeing a return on their investments in AI. We've also seen companies trying to convince us (or themselves) that ROI isn't important, and people should just stop worrying about it and that maybe in 5-10 years they'll start to reap some benefits. Some of the efforts people make to justify the costly investment they've made in AI can start looking a little desperate. All this token burning and tokenmaxxing might be another sign of that.

I think a lot of these execs have equity in Anthropic... and the dumb ones that don't are just "keeping up with the Joneses" so to speak.

It's more like "We really value face-to-face interaction, so we're going to track that with your total travel spend. We don't want to get in the way, so there's no budget."

This would be hilarious if a bunch of companies did not already do exactly this with exec travel. And academics do this all the time when travel has to be funded from grants.

One reason it works out like that for travel funding is that it’s often the ‘use it or lose it’ kind of funding. If you do not use all of the funds allotted, you can’t ask for more and could realistically get less.

Good time to be a sane company then. "Never interrupt your opponent while he is in the middle of making a mistake." and all.

awesome phrase

It seems like a natural result. People have been trying to use dashboards / metrics to roll up / indicate how well teams and individuals have been doing for a long time. Therefore, "part 1" was already in place. Now, something even easier to track is available (token usage). So, just throw token usage on the dashboard and tell people that higher is better - what other outcome would you possibly expect?

> dashboards / metrics to roll up / indicate how well teams and individuals have been doing for a long time

I'm actually a little curious about how long it has been. Bad managers have always prioritized irrelevant metrics, of course, but I have a feeling (backed by no data, just vibes) that management in general crossed a point of no return as soon as "data-driven" became a cross-industry buzzword.

Like, I vaguely remember a time when consumer interactions didn't always come with a request to fill out a survey (with the results getting turned into a number and fed into a dashboard somewhere). And then that changed, and now everything must turned into a number and that number must go up.

"Data driven" essentially means "scalar driven". There is nothing wrong with it if your chosen scalar is a proxy for anything that matters. Of course, usually no one can explain this mapping.

Look it might seem silly, but the point is to get all our employees to be travel-pilled. They just don't know how great travel is yet.

IMO, the investors behind AI play the Uber game: they subsidise the AI costs and inject it into all facets of society they can get their hands on. They can tell the execs to increase AI usage at any cost. Their bet is that we'll become AI addicts with athrophied brains before they run out of money.

Also, don't forget that their datacenters will burn our electricity and boil our rivers at rates much cheaper than what we are billed in our homes. So while you're happy generating mountains of AI slop, somewhere there is a datacenter boiling a river.

I'd compare this to a new patented formula of water that's nobody asked for, and the patent owners are trying to replace all water supply with their crap before we wake up.

But Brawndo's got what plants crave. It's got electrolytes.

No need to invoke a hypothetical water example, just look to how Nestlé pushed baby formula in developing countries¹:

>For example, IBFAN claims that Nestlé distributes free formula samples to hospitals and maternity wards; after leaving the hospital, the formula is no longer free, but because the supplementation has interfered with lactation, the family must continue to buy the formula.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Nestl%C3%A9_boycott

What if instead the manager was saying: “hey team I need you to all buy as many lotto tickets as possible!”

I feel like that’s a better analogy. Some charlatans are buying fake tickets, but as a manager who wants to win big, I’m ok with some chicanery so long as the average person is trying to honestly meet my directive.

Management has confided in me that token usage is a secret performance metric. At the same time I'm getting emails from infrastructure people about prompting techniques to get LLMs to speak more concisely to save the company money lmao. I'd prefer a video essay mode that bulks everything up.

Two years ago everyone would have told you that 'impact' was the way to measure people, and been aghast at tracking inputs like hours. Say what you will, but at least showing up at 8 didn't cost the company money. Today I see people spending time and money vibe coding tools in search of a problem, just to spend tokens and demonstrate that they're on board with the singularity.

I kind of get what they're thinking in trying to make sure all engineers use AI. For myself, and for the engineers working with me, I saw everyone go through an initial aversion and resistance to AI, and then an instant productivity boost when we started using them. So there's definitely a good reason to get everybody to start using AI. You don't want a good engineer resisting AI indefinitely if you know it will make them more productive.

Incentivizing people who are already using AI to use as many tokens as possible does seem a little crazy, though.

There is a limit somewhere, but I keep finding more and more ways to use AI.

Not just coding, but things like "here is my teams mandate, go through all my company's slack channels, linear tasks, notion pages, and recent merges in got, summarize any work other teams are doing that intersect with my team's work."

That'll burn a lot of tokens.

Set that up to run once or twice a week and give a report.

Sure, findings ways to burn tokens is not hard. Even finding ways to burn tokens on things (like your example) which are actually useful is not hard. But what is the ROI on that from the company perspective. I mean, you could have also hired an intern to do the job of collating this report every week. But if you went to your boss and asked to hire someone to do something, they would, reasonably, ask what the value of that thing is and whether it justifies more headcount. But we're in this bizarro world where the bosses are basically saying "go hire more people, even if you don't have specific high-value things for them to do. Just create make-work jobs for them!" It's wild.

It's worth reflecting on why it's so hard to convince hold outs to discover how AI might help them. The fundamental issue is that there really aren't many convincing demonstrations that hold outs can relate to and there remains basically no evidence of real value gained.

Users attest to higher productivity and point to material but intermediate factors like token use, generated lines of code, pr counts, etc, but there doesn't seem to be a convincing revolution in the quantity or quality of mature software being delivered.

Combine that puzzling impressions of outcomes with a sense, for many, that they don't feel like they have a personal problem that warrants a new tool, and you end up with a pretty earnest and defensible indifference.

To get hold out engineers using AI, the industry needs to be focused on demonstrating relatable workflow improvements and demonstrating practical improvements to finished work product. Instead, policies like token use incentives just rely on luring them into pulling the slot machine handle with the expectation that once they do, they'll join the cadre of other converts who justify their transition with subjective improvements and intermediate metrics.

> It's worth reflecting on why it's so hard to convince hold outs to discover how AI might help them

I have. My conclusion is... humans are deeply irrational when it comes to rapid change.

Egg or olive oil prices spike, humans out an entire government.

The rate of immigration spikes, humans throw them into camps and break useful treaties.

Most of the resistance I've observed amongst engineers is resistance to change generally.

And then digging in when challenged.

> Most of the resistance I've observed amongst engineers is resistance to change generally.

Most engineers I've known are enthusiastic when given the opportunity to play around with a new toy. What they don't like is anything being forced on them. There's nothing irrational about that. They've often invested a lot of time into optimizing their workflows.

I've also found that if something actually makes their work easier, you will never have to twist their arm to make them use it. They'll apply it everywhere it helps. They'll even try using it in places and in ways it was never intended for. If they're digging in, you likely haven't made a very compelling case for your changes.

  > What they don't like is anything being forced on them

raises hand (n=1), i'm fine to use it when i need it, but the derangement by management about it is a total put-off and unnecessary (and in the end counter-productive)

Exactly this

>Here's a new editor we made

Cool, looks interesting, I'd love to use it more

>We're forcing you to use it

I hate it

Yeah. Nobody mandated Jetbrains products, almost every developer I know decided for themselves. Actually, it was the opposite: I remember asking a company I once worked for to buy me a license. Took 6 months for them to finally agree. Now my monthly allotment of tokens is way bigger than the price of that license, and it was given freely.

Yep, if a toy was that good, then everyone would be begging their managers to use it, not the other way around.

Nobody ever had to force me to use keyword coloring, code formatters, source control, or a bug tracker.

> resistance to change generally

Nah, software engineers were always butterflies fluttering from one language or framework to the Next Hot Thing. Change was part of the job, if you didn't keep up you fell behind and atrophied.

Resistance to AI is, I think, more because it is seen as an existential threat, or because it's something whose ultimate long-term outcome is still undefined. It's going to be either a benefit or a hazard, and we don't yet know whether we'll need Bladerunners to rein it in.

I think I can offer an alternate explanation and it jives with your first point.

When I use AI to completely write code for me (not using it as a powerful auto complete), it's not fun. I don't learn anything. It takes everything I love about software development and makes it just like any other job.

I'm also never happy with the result and, when I go back to make it work the way I want it to, I have to learn a new code base that isn't built the way I would have. If that happens to a project I'm working on as a hobby, I find it incredibly unmotivating.

It turns my intellectual pursuit into an assembly line and I hate that.

Resistance to AI is because it doesn't work. It has nothing to do with job security. It's a tech with nothing but hype, no substance at all.

Here's one selling factor from the experience I'm experiencing right now:

Others will use AI, and it will make your life miserable. You need to know enough about AI to be able to fight back.

The experience: one employee, self-selected, assigned themselves to a task of configuring integration with MySQL HA deployment. They produced a mountain of code in a short month (we are talking about close to a hundred thousands lines of Python code). And they decided to go with Oracle's tools, instead of Galera...

Everything this employee produces is, quite obviously, AI-generated. Also, in the initial stages, they worked on their project completely alone: no reviews. To give some sense of size of this insanity: one of the configuration scripts I'm working with now is a 9K+ loc of Python that's supposed to run from `mysqlsh`. About half of it is module-level variables.

It will take many months to restructure this "prototype" by hand. It's a pain to read and to navigate. GitLab UI has a perceivable lag just trying to display the script, forget about diffs. I will absolutely need AI to try to make sense of it (I'm not allowed to fix it). But, and if it ever comes to fixing, I can't imagine this to be done without automation of some sort.

Unfortunately, AI generates problems that, sometimes, only AI can fix. :(

It's the same old adage of "garbage in, garbage out". If the employee in question is clueless, good luck producing something useful or at least tailored for the job.

Unfortunately, a convincing demonstration to convince a skeptical colleague would require measuring developer productivity.

Among skeptics, I've only seen people won over by using it themselves, because when they use AI for their own work, they invest the time to review the code, understand it, and assess its quality by their own standards. That's how people learn to trust AI coding assistance.

Perhaps amusingly, I think I actually trusted it more before I started using it. Specifically because of my assessment of its quality, including things like factual correctness.

There's only really one measure, ultimately, and that's profits. Are these heavy AI companies raking in 10x profits with their 10x'd developers?

THIS is exactly what I want to see. Show me 10 randomly selected “All in on AI” companies that are running circles around a control group of 10 randomly selected similar but traditional software development companies. Show the AI-using companies being measurably more profitable.

Software engineering organizations have agreed for decades that a meaningful measure of developer productivity is a literal impossibility.

So now introduce AI and then tell every developer that they need to be 20% more effective 20% of what?

I've been using it for many months. I still haven't gotten any kind of boost. If I'm going to get ranked on token use though, best believe I'll be using the optimal quantity of tokens.

Yeah management should make clear they just don’t want to see AI use of zero in a given week. Not “more tokens consumed the better“ on performance reviews.

People are not actually more productive with LLMs, they are less productive. The data has shown this. So there's no reason to push people into using them - it's all just hype and magical thinking.

If you view AI as a religion, it starts to make sense: "There is this new god now, and if we don't worship properly, we will get eaten."

I wonder where in business school they teach you to "measure inputs and try to maximize them", because that's basically what's happening.

> Imagine if your CEO woke up one day and told the company: "We need to encourage travel spending. Please book as many business trips as you can, and spend as much money as possible.

I had a manager like this once. He didn't last very long, but it was without a doubt the most fun six months of my career.

It’s preposterous, companies are blindly funding slop and the product is fool’s gold.

It's the state of modern capitalism. Money must flow from one entity to another even if nothing of tangible value is produced. The flows of money prove the growth of both businesses.

what kind of metric should we use to filter out that bullshit?

dollarhours?

If I spend money on tokens but my revenue doesn't increase, nor do I get any operating efficiency gains - where is my growth then buddy boyo?

The growth in revenue's (since earnings are negative for them) only shows up for the model producer

It might be an ROI calculation, e.g. some people will waste tokens, but if it means someone else feels empowered to make something awesome or impactful, it will have been worth it.

I've definitely been in situations where managers tell me to "spend X amount before the end of the year." They don't want higher ups to think they can cut our budget.

Spending is just a proxy for AI use here. This is nothing new. I remember past CEOs saying “Ajax! Ajax! Ajax!”, “Big data! Big data! Why aren’t we using Big data!”

AI is just the next tool to over spend on in poor ways, realise it’s shit and spend a ton more money trying to roll it back.

The situations where is shines will continue to use it when the hype dies down.

Oh wow, I totally forgot that "Ajax! Ajax! Ajax!" was a thing back then, that was at the beginning of my career and it was just as baffling hearing executives calling for a such a under the hood tech choice without understanding how it actually works.

The "Big data!" calls though did make more sense coming from executives, obviously it was also often dumb, but it was a lot easier for them to understand the results. However most companies would have been better off waiting 5-10 years before jumping into it as a lot of money was wasted on processes and tools that are completely outdated today.

The most important part being:

"Because we FEEL this will make you more productive and we will make more money!"

No evidence but more Lines of Code...

its more like you have purchased unlimited monthly travel for a fixed cost for your employees for $20. And you want your employees to maximize travel, since you already paid the $20.

because it's come to CFO's as "free debt" aka fiat printing. They need to spend thisfree fiat to keep buble going. I'm sure some inv. banking team internally assured too. $Trillion instuitions have access to free printer now, you and I don't. This is different world since unlimited printer started in 2020. All debt math is fake now because they can create fiat money out of nothing, literally.

People think we’re living in oh so capitalist times, why then does everything smell soviet.

Horseshoe theory

Nonsense. It’s a little bit of a loss leader so devs are hooked on it and it’s considered incredibly unproductive to work without one. Then they will just have 10 peoples jobs replaced with one guy.

It's like if class-based society materialized within the IT. And the manager class collectively pushes the narrative of AI replacing ICs.

Note that it has beaten capitalism, making rational choices to increase earnings has lost to this AI dream.

Note that propagandizing managers was a rational choice by AI companies to increase the revenue of AI companies.

I'm making sure to use the most expensive model possible for the stupidest shit constantly. They asked for it!

If we suddenly went from rail travel to jets that's exactly what would happen. We'd go from 0 to all the business flights that happen today. Everyone would be under enormous pressure to not be a laggard.

I washed a former intelligence agency person get interviewed on a youtube talk show and (tangential to the policy subject being discussed) they they said that's basically how it was after 9/11. We couldn't onboard people fast enough to figure out how to spend the money so while we were doing that we flew first class half way around the world to waterboard people with bottled water. The people authorizing it didn't care. They were spending X to fight terrorism. The public was never gonna see the nitty gritty breakdown.

That's basically how it seems to be with AI. Just replace "spent X fighting terrorism" with "spent X implementing AI workflows" or "invested X in AI" or whatever. Nobody actually knows or cares just how far the dollars are going.

I think this version is getting very close to The Emperor's New Clothes Subscription in terms of how transparently the leadership are displaying their delusions.

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