https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law

But if you hit "tab" it'll claim that as an AI-edited line, LOL.

(A lot of the rest of it is stuff I could already have been doing just as fast if I'd ever bothered to learn to use multiple cursors, learned vim navigation, or set up some macros—I never did because my getting-code-on-the-screen speed without those has never been slow enough to hold anything up, in practice)

Yes, and that’s a good thing! This is in fact where a lot of AI value lies. You dont need to know that command anymore - knowing the functional contract is now sufficient to perform the requisite work duties. This is huge!

Probably there is no dichotomy going on and it depends on multiple factors, but it seems so weird to see reports that are so different between each other.

As time passes and the layers of abstraction pile up, later generations won't understand the underlying layers of the abstraction. This is a huge weakness in our systems development -- and a huge potential attack surface for adversaries.

If I own part of a company, and I spend money on their goods, and a result their revenues climb and consequently my valuation does too - then my firm value will be higher.

This would also explain the gung-ho approach. Some pretty devious financial engineering akin to arbitrage

And the fact that it is an industry-wide meme at this point makes bright red flashing lights and klaxons go off on my mind that a catastrophic reckoning can't be too far. There's not enough money in the world to keep this up for too long.

We have always been living in bonkers time.

Managers love metrics. Bad managers particularly love metrics. Tokens used was almost the obvious bad metric that was going to be used.

I would argue that tokens used has actually exposed a useful metric: any manager who focused on this, demanded this or ranked based on this should be fired, for being a bad manager.

[1]: https://evan-soohoo.medium.com/did-elon-musk-really-fire-peo...

Incentivizing people who are already using AI to use as many tokens as possible does seem a little crazy, though.

Also, don't forget that their datacenters will burn our electricity and boil our rivers at rates much cheaper than what we are billed in our homes. So while you're happy generating mountains of AI slop, somewhere there is a datacenter boiling a river.

I'd compare this to a new patented formula of water that's nobody asked for, and the patent owners are trying to replace all water supply with their crap before we wake up.

I had a manager like this once. He didn't last very long, but it was without a doubt the most fun six months of my career.

One reason it works out like that for travel funding is that it’s often the ‘use it or lose it’ kind of funding. If you do not use all of the funds allotted, you can’t ask for more and could realistically get less.

Incompetent use of a coding agent, or just general shenanigans, can burn tokens all day but it's not going to get tickets done.

Just looking at the work output - how many story points, tickets, how many new bugs are opened, etc. has not become any less relevant a metric for productivity with AI. If you're a skilled and proper user of AI those numbers would be changing in the right direction, compared to before you had it.

Some companies might just have been scammed by the marketing that told them that AI would make all their employees 10,000x more productive and save them billions and when that didn't happen the assumption was that it's because employees weren't using the magical AI as often as they should be.

Other companies, especially those working on their own AI products, might want employees to use AI as much as possible because they hope it will provide them with the training data they'll need to eventually replace most or all of those employees with the AI. Punishing workers who refuse to train their AI replacement might make sense to them because even though it's costly right now they expect the savings down the road to be much much greater.

Note that it has beaten capitalism, making rational choices to increase earnings has lost to this AI dream.

I worked for an international (mothership in the UK, later acquired by the US) company, which had... sort of a similar policy.

So, the (mothership) company acquired a lot of satellite companies, all in banking business. All over the world. Then they figured their CEO was corrupt, got in problems with the law, got kicked out. While they were waiting for the new "real" CEO to step in, they let some "interim" CEO to take his place.

New new (interim) CEO didn't seem to have a clue about the business she was supposed to run, nor did she care. She knew her time was running out, and she figured she'd spend it traveling the world and partaking in fine dining in every corner of the world the company's tentacle could reach. But, to make it seem more plausible, she, sort of, created a policy of "experience exchange", which sent random troupes of select individuals from different branches of the company to "exchange experience" with another similarly randomly assembled troupe. Of course, the company picked the bill when it comes to lodging and dining.

Our inconsequential branch in Israel saw a pilgrimage of high-ranking banking managers from all over the world, but, mostly the wealthier parts of it. Some didn't even bother to show up in the office though, and proceeded straight to the banquet hall of the most expensive hotel on the Tel Aviv beach.

To be fair though, the interim CEO got the boot even before her time was supposed to end, but it was serendipitously close to the acquisition by the US company, and so she was let go as part of a "restructuring" and "optimization"... but it was a crazy year!

Two years ago everyone would have told you that 'impact' was the way to measure people, and been aghast at tracking inputs like hours. Say what you will, but at least showing up at 8 didn't cost the company money. Today I see people spending time and money vibe coding tools in search of a problem, just to spend tokens and demonstrate that they're on board with the singularity.

(If you are a VP at Amazon, yes, I'll consider acquisition offers. I'm also working on an enterprise version of this with additional features.)

Show HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48151287

Luckily I work in app management and I know they can only see the last date used so if I just put in one query per day I'm good.

But I'm so sick and tired of this AI hype :(

USSR barely accounted for 15% of the world caught amount (with Japan as the leader).

> that nobody wanted to eat

unsubstantiated.

The problem with not burning tokens is when you not meet the performance KPIs, get labelled as luddite and off you go, even before the job gets taken over by AI.

I do agree with the sentiment, that and war mongers destroying the planet.

But the thing is, the problem is the person, not the technology. He was already like this before LLMs. He would "refactor" repos into smaller repos, and all of a sudden all of the code has his name. If you just skim, it looks like he build a huge chunk of the codebase in the company. He also has a history of saying no to stuff I want to do, then he does it himself. Also nitpick my PRs to no end (or straight says he doesn't think he should do that thing) and then he turns around and implements it himself. He doesn't copy paste my code, but he does re-implement himself the same ideas that he just said no to after my PR was open. Very smart guy, very dishonest. But he's good at being dishonest. If you ask him about it he says "oh I just though that this way would be more organized" or something like that. From the outside you could make the argument that one way is better than the other (for reasons I would claim are irrelevant), so it's not obvious that he's being dishonest. But since I see 100% of what he does, it's entirely clear to me that this is a pattern.

EDIT: just remembered another one. One time I asked him to take a specific week of holidays. He didnt say "no" but he did mention that we're under a lot of pressure to deliver The Thing, and if I would delay my holidays. I said "No, I'm not going to delay them", so he approved it. Then when the time came around, he took holidays in the same week. On this one I didn't challenge him, I already know him well enough to know the truth which is he's no ashamed to ask from others things that he would never himself accept.

True, but it looks like productivity to people whose own productivity is measured by how busy their subordinates appear to be.

But, I can't figure out how to put my job back into command mode :-(

Big companies have thousands of leaders. Many good, many bad.

The problem explodes at any company that puts up a token use leaderboard or hints that they might do layoffs for engineers that refuse to use AI tools. This triggers a race to use as many tokens as possible to stay ahead.

Anecdotally, the problem is worst among devs who read a lot of social media. Twitter, Threads, Mastodon, LinkedIn, and others are filled with recycled viral stories about companies going AI-native and firing people who don't use enough AI. Anxieties are high right now so nervous developers see this and think they must burn tokens faster than their peers to avoid an inevitable culling.

We have token tracking dashboards that leadership is looking at. I know because they show us in these manager meetings. Haven't opened them to everyone yet as some kind of leaderboard, so at least that's nice.

Lots of rumors token spend will be involved in perf reviews. Leadership denies it... but then holds more meetings telling us how important it is to increase our token spend and discussing inadequacies from the token spend dashboards.

Stuff that could be easily done as shell scripts gets asked how could we make an agent out of it.

This isn't like that, as it isn't funded through taxes. This is private companies experimenting with their money, and risking downstream cost increases that may cause people to go elsewhere, as they do when they try anything new.

This is much better than just funding people regardless of productivity through forced taxes.

[0] https://nintil.com/the-soviet-union-achieving-full-employmen...

Tokens is just yet another proxy for business value.

The problem they face is if everybody is judge by business value in dollars, crappy managers are the first to go

For companies doing this there is no 'justify the expenditure'. Employees are being praised for high expenditure, regardless of actual outcome.

Leadership see the problem as 'people resisting AI'. Embracing AI is seen as the solution, and token usage is seen as the measure of success.

Slack will start serving porn next.

theres so much work available that teams try to avoid taking stuff on as much as possible.

the bottleneck to building more is almost certainly the cross team coordination

likely the best place add agents too. an llm tpm would be super handy tool to scale amazon productivity, rather than coding agents.