alt Hacker NewsHi! Author here. I don't actually think they're deliberately doing this, hence my choice of "perverse incentives" vs. something more accusatory. The issue is that they don't have a ton of incentive to fix it.
Agree with you on all the rest, and I think writing a post like this was very much intended as a gut-check on things since the early days are hopefully the times when things can get fixed up.
My speculation is that these companies have significant reason to prioritize lowering the amount of tokens produced as well as cost of tokens.
The leaked Claude Code codebase was riddled with "concise", "do not add comments", "mimic codestyle", even an explicit "You should minimize output tokens as much as possible" etc. Btw, Claude Code uses a custom system prompt, not the leaked 24k claude.ai one.