Its not _just_ that. Orgs aren't remotely sensible at measuring anything that isn't counted in dollars.

employees who are on the ai bandwagon are there for the free management attention.

Management is cooked because the damn market is hard, money is tight and they can't afford to fight the top down love and $$$ thrown at AI.

If you zoom out, all the real money spent on energy to keep AI alive isn't going to be held in nvidia stock for too long. it will burst, but its stupid to time it.

The implication that tokenmaxxing was an intentional and thoughtfully considered approach rather than blind hype-following by an overpaid manager class who are too far removed from value to understand the downsides of LLMs is hysterical beyond belief.

An interesting side effect of this spreading across social media is that even companies without token leaderboards were having problems with needless tokenmaxxing.

When everyone was reading about token leaderboards on all of their social media channels (include social news sites like Reddit and Hacker News) it created token anxiety even at companies that didn’t want a leaderboard. Programmers were afraid that their managers would be secretly ranking them based on token usage and they needed to pump up those numbers to avoid layoffs.

Once teams implemented token budgets in response it creates an ugly situation where a few people feel the need to use as many tokens as they can at the beginning of the budget window to stay ahead.

It’s really frustrating to have this phenomenon leak into a company that was never encouraging or looking for high token use.

The smart move would have been to get lower level managers to assign specific employees to experiment with applying LLMs to their processes and report back. Then incorpoate the findings into their processes.

Instead there was FOMO mass hysteria. Now there is a backlash. And a lot of time and money wasted.

having heard the arguments made by some VP + C-levels throughout the Tokenmaxxing Tulip Mania, I think the interpretation that those mandates were made intentionally for "forcing employees to start leveraging AI in meaningful ways" is too charitable.

Most companies focused entirely on doing "what everyone else is doing" at best or "to see if Programmer Joe can be as productive as the entire team so we can fire the rest".

And many indeed fired employees in droves because they were "underperforming in token spend".

I remember a story on HN from a while back. The idea is that the larger the org, the simpler the message and the tool has to be to reach everyone. The comment author was saying that as a junior, his company implemented a "tokenmaxxing" scheme for A/B testing - more tests, better for performance review. He, back then, thought it was stupid. However, it got the desired outcome of everyone being familiar with what experiments are and how to run them.

People in small teams with managers promoted from within could probably have had this in mind.

Big Corporate managers are much more likely to have felt the need to “do AI” from their VPs, who in turn got it from the executive team, who have probably been under fire to produce a coherent magical AI strategy that makes to company scale infinitely while reducing costs. In that environment it’s much more likely to be copy-and-pasted charts from Gartner and buzzwords overheard at conferences, combined with the hope that somebody somewhere will eventually turn it all into something that resembles forward movement.

That's a very good point. Our company has been very thrifty with our AI spend, until a few months ago the average employee had ~$50 of supported spend and I was trying to be an AI leader in the company and figure out what was and was not possible, I had a $100/mo spend (Claude $100 service costs $108/mo).

We are now seeing that Claude Code can do a LOT of heavy lifting in our day-to-day work, but the bulk of our employees are stuck cost-maxing and literally cannot "imagine how you are running into your session limits". "I'm fine with the $20/mo account."

There's a case for the cost-maxing has hurt our company.

Yeah there's no way that was the reason. I judge it to be a combination of FOMO and the big tech companies needing to pump demand for compute.

> There's no need to overthink this.

I agree, but for a completely different reason. A lot of executives simply chase trends. This was another trend they copied from each other. No reason to imagine they carefully studied the issue.

This is an insane level of cope.

The whole tokenmaxxing thing started because Jensen Huang said insane things like having a single engineer spend 250k in tokens or he’d fire him; and that OpenClaw was basically AGI.

> No one is stupid enough to always measure performance based on token spend and have unlimited budget.

Yes the people forcing these mandates absolutely are this stupid because that’s what people like Jensen Huang, Peter Steinberger and Boris Cherney were touting. Seriously have you ever actually talked to an average C-Level about AI? They are absolutely cooked.

You’re the one that’s overthinking it.

The problem is that managers have no idea how this is supposed to help either, and just get told from above to use AI.

Independent of everything else, very interesting to see how polarized the comments are here

might be the first time I've seen this reasonable and obviously correct interpretation of the last 6-12 months so directly and unapologetically stated. bravo

It really wasn't. It was a moronic move fueled by hype, implemented by the same type of incompetent business leaders who previously, to various extents, drank the blockchain and metaverse kool-aid.

There was demonstrably zero cost or consequence analysis, which is also why it was dialed back as soon as the (still) subsidized tokens became just slightly less subsidized, and the wise leaders realized they spent huge sums of money with no way of gauging ROI.

LLMs may have their use cases, but let's not make up free excuses for blithering idiots who, by any rights, should all be fired for cooking up money-burning policies that are textbook implementations of Goodhart's law.

Anyway, just needed to get that off my chest.

Do you have a source for this?

> Tokenmaxxing was just a way to force employees to start leveraging AI in a meaningful way.

> It was always a temporary thing to transition the employees to a new world.

Trying to understand your justification for rejecting Hanlon’s razor.

You’re post rationalizating

You're naive, uninformed or turfing if you think companies are still not tokenmaxxing.

Also tokenmaxxing was never an intentional and smart strategy employed by companies like you say. It was a mix of fear of missing out, signaling to investors they were in on the hype and recouping investmenets in data centers

An insane re-writing of the last year of bullshit insanity. Good one.

No. While what you’re saying makes sense, that’s not the logic behind the token max mentality. It’s simply lazy ineffective leaders who are bad at their jobs and don’t make rational decisions. They really did think spending more is somehow going to make their business better.

> Tokenmaxxing was just a way to force employees to start leveraging AI in a meaningful way.

Of course not. That is not what it achieved or could possibly achieve.

> Management felt like employees weren't leveraging AI fast enough.

I agree it was about their irrational feelings.

> Tokenmaxxing was just a way to force employees to start leveraging AI in a meaningful way.

No, it was a sinister way to manufacture your consent to cause cognitive atrophy in your employees so that you lose your ability to independently operate your business.

You'll come to realize this once they begin charging you more and more for tokens but you will probably not blame yourself for it.