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Comment by christkv

3 days ago

Seems to be a clear case of Goodhart's Law that states that "when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

That's true, but I don't know if this one was ever a good measure in the first place.

People use AI differently and they can be equally productive with a variety of token usage quantities.

Also, different kinds of work are differently amenable to using AI.

  • Measuring tokens used can absolutely be useful; tracking things like cost, compute-demand, usage to negotiate a better contract, and on and on.

    Using it to grade people is, err, rather unwise.

  • I think we've found an extension of Goodhart's law- it makes bad measures even worse.

"When a measure exists, it becomes a target" is the reason I can never write TODO again.