Comment by izanton

I'm going to offer a contrarian view here:

First is that despite a lot of waste, some innovation will arise from an enterprising employee finding some interesting use case. A lot of the tokenmaxxing is just waste, but out of that waste may arise a small number of genuinely powerful use cases.

Second is that many workers will be entrenched in their ways. If your executive goal is to achieve the above (find innovative ways of using AI), then you need to move everyone to use it. Most will just waste tokens, but someone may find a novel and useful way of using it that benefits the organization. It is difficult to achieve these without forcing people to act since their default is to follow the well-worn grooves.

So mandates like these are a top-down forcing function like a slime mold feeling out different paths to find resources.

Some devs in my org have fully embraced AI; some would not even use AI if not for leadership mandates and linking usage to performance reviews (I know, I think this is stupid, too). I can see why mandates could be useful since some folks definitely won't be inclined to use AI.

There was an amusing post about judging developers based on token usage where some user on HN here was pushing this idea “ICs don’t like it but this is the best way to evaluate” (something like that).

They have a whole management team and can’t seem to find a way to judge or god forbid encourage developers…

> Everyone’s strategy looks exactly the same.

If one is a CxO who's looking out for one's job security, herd-like behavior is the safest option, due to the (near universal) structure of "performance"-based executive remuneration.

Is keeping your company private the easiest way to get around this?

It should not be overlooked that a lot of this fervor is from investors/board members putting pressure on these companies.

Lacking not just courage, but also character. Wasting company money on buzzwords and dubious outcomes is lack of character.

"True visionaries think outside the box,"

I mean that's more of an ex-post statement.

Ex-ante they look at things as objects and visualise/simulate what one ought to do independently, as opposed to being a lemming.

Yeah courage will get you fired. Whether it be about idiot product decisions, or about how your bosses treat your coworkers. That’s the consequence of letting sociopaths get in charge.

Maybe it's time we adopt/design an economic system that isn't so easily co-opted by counterproductive prisoner's dilemmas.

> managers trying to get their teams to stop thinking that their token use will be used as a proxy for their performance.

Because it is going to happen. Do you think metrics are tracked for fun?

Even if current leaders don't do it, next people might do it, how do you tell new leaders that we don't look at this metric? Metric exists to take action based on it

> I participate in some management-focused online communities.

I know - slightly off topic - but would you be willing to share this list?

I can personally verify that Cisco does it and they're not exactly at the top of the food chain. It's probably more common than you think.

Yes, but, I sleep very soundly at night.

It's because the average organization has lots of people who don't care about their own productivity and won't adopt new tools or processes unless forced to. This is true of most new tech - lots of workers had to be forced into using computers - but AI also has some other bumps to cross like lots of people who tried early models and then wrote them off, not realizing how fast they'd improve. And most orgs have no infrastructure or processes for allocating individuals token budgets, and most employees have no experience of properly deploying budgets.

Roll it all together and saying "just use it dammit" has some obvious advantages:

1. It's clear.

2. It's simple.

3. It eliminates all excuses employees might come up with for not using it.

The people at the top of these companies aren't stupid. They might have miscalculated how many tokens people can actually use, but that's very hard to calculate because usage is opaque and tools/processes change on a nearly weekly basis. They will eventually build out processes, tools, social conventions and performance metrics that take into account efficiency of token usage. But this is hard! Most managers aren't really assessed on the precise productivity of their teams, for instance, because productivity is often poorly defined.

> what leads people to this type of thinking once they get in a group setting

Game theory! The downside of being brave vastly outweighs the upside. For the C-suite, there is no cost to herdlike-behavior, regardless of the outcome. However, there is a very high personal downside to being a maverick, and your board later discovers you made the wrong choice against the grain. The upside of being maverick and right is very limited.

Once a behavior has become mainstream, hopping on the bandwagon is no longer individually attributable to decision-makers, but is seen (and reported) as a macro-economic phenomenon: Nadella, Zuckerberg and Bezos didn't overhire - the American tech industry overhired.

we are going through our second AI transformation, the first one didn't work that well because the tools were shit.

Whats happening now and whos driving it is interesting. The CEO has a license for this new tool (think one of the top 4, Qwen Claude, Gemini, openAI) and really likes it. So much so that they (non coder) are making lots of little single page web apps.

The COO is bollocks deep in AI, and is saying that we cannot buy any SaaS products anymore. We must make it ourselves.

The engineering manager has seen this as an opportunity to build out a brand for engineering (its a small department in a medium sized company) by delivering quickly what the large year long efforts cant.

This has formed a slopnexus where PoCs are spun up left right and centre, but there isn't much time or thought going in to making them sustainable.

What started out as a (simple ish) asset management tool, neatly scoped into a deliverable PoC has morphed into a 5 product as one monster.

Its a mess that will either lead to burn out or disaster.

> what leads people to this type of thinking once they get in a group setting? It just... seems endemic at this point.

Large and fascinating topic I'm researching, very relevant for agentic AI and ML too. One way that groups can fail is that they just don't work to dampen / vote out individual errors properly (see PAC learning, Condorcet). Other kinds of errors only occur in groups, and can occur even when constituents individually aren't actually wrong. Some related stuff is:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet's_jury_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_polarization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_cascade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_cascade

The last is probably the most relevant here and made worse by the negative effects of hierarchy. To quote one section:

> The negative effects of informational cascades sometimes become a legal concern and laws have been enacted to neutralize them. Ward Farnsworth, a law professor, analyzed the legal aspects of informational cascades and gave several examples in his book The Legal Analyst: in many military courts, the officers voting to decide a case vote in reverse rank order (the officer of the lowest rank votes first), and he suggested it may be done so the lower-ranked officers would not be tempted by the cascade to vote with the more senior officers, who are believed to have more accurate judgement;

For token-maxxing, our "senior officers" are just executives, and line workers aren't going to vote. Who is the senior officer for those senior officers? It's not shareholders! It's really the executives of even bigger companies, because that is the actually applicable promotion ladder. It's all kind of obvious, but also a genuinely better explanation than "monkey see monkey do". These are just the simpler things, and there's more gnarly dilemmas in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_knowledge_(logic)

Won’t be canned for going with the herd. I think it’s that simple, even if the herd is running off a cliff.

This is a consequence of elements of monopoly power existing in your organization. When you don't have to compete for income you honestly forget how. Then the company becomes a cargo cult of bad ideas driven by managers struggling to differentiate themselves.

The crazy thing is their salary does not actually benefit from riding these trends. Unless it's equally/even more clueless board level pressure with ulterior motives (i.e., lifting their other AI investments or the sector as a whole).

They get paid for saying whatever VCs want to hear and now that thing is "we have now become an AI-native company". The thing I'm still trying to understand is who is scamming whom