“Token Standoff.” The most efficient token consumer wins. This mutually assured time efficiency destruction is driven by management support of aggressive use of AI in an attempt to, in some combination, increase productive and constrain labor costs.

AI isn’t making developers more productive – it’s making them busier - https://leaddev.com/ai/ai-isnt-making-developers-more-produc... - June 11th, 2026

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

You are thinking of "game theory" and it's what happens when your coworkers don't give a shit. And all it takes is one, both because they can degrade product quality faster than you can gate it or fix it and because the performance assessment techniques are about 3 years behind the state of LLMs and if they play, you have to also or you'll get shit on from such a height you won't even know what hit you.

And once you start playing the game, then one day - it doesn't take long - you wake up and ask yourself if this is how you want to spend 8 hours of your life monday through friday. I think a lot of us are saying no but now need to figure out where our money is going to come from. I don't have the answers.

When someone submits PRs fulky made by Clade any "cooperative work" is out the door

In a previous job, we had this saying "killing penguins" we used when referring to throwing more computing resources (more GNU/Linux instances) than necessary at a problem. In today's landscape of indiscriminate AI spending, I bet we could repurpose the term to mean "actually negatively impacting the arctic biodiversity".

We are all throwing penguins at each other.

Now I'm wondering how hard it'd be to zipbomb their context window?

(And _now_ I'm wondering how hard it'd be to forkbomb their agentic workflow?)