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Comment by efnx | Hacker News Reader

Just have an agent chug on a side-project for you, or set up a CI script to review every pull request or some similarly “helpful” task. That should eat a lot of tokens!

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Man. If I had this kind of mandate I could really burn some tokens. Review each new PR and extract 100 topics to debate related to it. Spin up 1000 sub agents, each with a different personality profile system prompt, to debate each point until consensus has been reached. Synthesize the learnings into a limerick. Build a Spotify playlist that pairs with the tone of the debates. Post the limerick and link to playlist on the PR and tag me to notify me that I have a PR to review.

Also, post the limerick to HN.

Oh man, when MCP was still new and shiny I made an MCP that let the AI choose appropriate theme music for what it was doing and it was an absolute blast, I need to make a more modern one.

Peer Gynt Suite's "In the Hall of the Mountain King" made a prominent appearance, but so did Aqua's "Barbie Girl"

Depends on how much you're asked to burn I guess. Until one point, it's actually helpful. Then there's a point where you can do stuff that's semi helpful but doesn't get in the way. But then I would imagine you reach a point where you have to come up with a token burn strategy and some kind of narrative for your manager that's in line with it. I bet at that last point, it gets taxing.

Probably like eating. Having to eat less to loose weight isn't great. Eating anything you want without worries is great. Having to eat more than you want to gain weight, not great.

> side-projects

Just be careful about any legal implication of doing side-projects during work with work-resources.

Ideally, you should ask the LLM to write that CI script.

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