I have started using the most token-intensive model I can find and asking for complicated tasks (rewrite this large codebase, review the resulting code, etc.)

The agent will churn in a loop for a good 15-20 minutes and make the leaderboard number go up. The result is verbose and useless but it satisfies the metrics from leadership.

> Our token usage and number of lines changed will affect our performance review this year.

I'm going nuts, because as I was "growing up" as a programmer (that was 20+ years ago) it was stuff like this [1] that made me (and people like me) proud to be called a computer programmer. Copy-pasting it in here, for future reference, and because things have turned out so bleak:

> They devised a form that each engineer was required to submit every Friday, which included a field for the number of lines of code that were written that week. (...)

> Bill Atkinson, the author of Quickdraw and the main user interface designer, who was by far the most important Lisa implementer, thought that lines of code was a silly measure of software productivity. He thought his goal was to write as small and fast a program as possible, and that the lines of code metric only encouraged writing sloppy, bloated, broken code. (...)

> He was just putting the finishing touches on the optimization when it was time to fill out the management form for the first time. When he got to the lines of code part, he thought about it for a second, and then wrote in the number: -2000.

[1] https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html

This is insane.

> Our token usage and number of lines changed will affect our performance review this year.

The AI-era equivalent of that old Dilbert strip about rewarding developers directly for fixing bugs ("I'm gonna write me a new mini-van this afternoon!") just substitute intentional bug creation with setting up a simple agent loop to burn tokens on random unnecessary refactoring.

Could you both name and shame?