alt Hacker NewsAI mandate is one of the best things that's happened to me. It's the easiest metric to game in the world.
At one point my boss asked why my AI usage was lower than other team members. I instantly knew what to do. Every session is now run at ultracode effort. My automated PR review bot averages like $80 in usage per PR review.
Replies
https://github.com/dtnewman/burn-baby-burn
Get ready for that promotion!
It's also the easiest way to determine if your management has AI psychosis or not, and make corresponding decisions about whether to stay with the company.
I'd unironically like my workplace to cover AI spend for me.
There's so, so much mechanically simple but time consuming refactoring that should be done but nobody ever does that because there's never enough free time. Or even various utility scripts and at least finding out of date docs (or writing very basic ones where none exist, though it'd be hard to get them not to feel like slop writing). Or figuring out what additional custom linter rules would be useful, how to improve the CI pipelines and so on.
If I had the Anthropic Max 20x subscription, I could make a large part of the technical backlog disappear (relatively safely).
Parkinson's Law: Work expands to fill the time available.
Updated version: Tokens expand to exceed the budget available.
Fantasy: automated productivity
Reality: automated bullshit makework and bureaucracy
It is extremely easy to burn tokens if that is required. Explore this codebase. Team x wants y feature, research and generate a full plan. What does feature x in codebase y actually mean? Analyze code coverage in x. Map out code flow and find concurrency bugs in y and on and on...
Oh and my favorite: Use 5 independent subagents to review code change and summarize the findings, and for any finding determine if they are real concerns