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

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".

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

  Do you have a source for this?

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

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.

  the big tech companies needing to pump demand for compute.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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 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.

> 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.

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

> 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.

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

To be fair leaders usually don't say that, they say a whole lot of nothing that means "We're gonna set money on fire because it makes me feel good."

Or more accurately, "Because this is good for my career."

> database servers are Swiss city names, web servers are Denmark, storage is Finland

consider me officially triggered

Agreed. There is way too much noise made out of this from a handful of companies.

> Just repeating the same prompt until you get the desired result?

Not necessarily the desired result, but until it's 'done', where the LLM itself is the judge on if the is the case according to the given criteria (often just an updated todo-list). One of those extremely simple 'harnesses' (if you can even call it that) was even named the 'Ralph Wiggum Loop' [1] to allude to the braindead-but-persistent tokenmaxxing it results in.

[1] https://awesomeclaude.ai/ralph-wiggum

I do abuse this title format, guilty as charged