Comment by CharlieDigital
1 day ago
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.
> but out of that waste may arise a small number of genuinely powerful use cases.
Imagine you employ me as a hotel manager, and I come to you and say: "sure I spent all our food budget internationally in three months, and sure I have nothing really to show for it, but for those three months, we had a lot of food fights"
Your manager then goes on to explain they not only need more money to cover the food budget, but also they need to quituple the cleaning budget too.
Oh and the service level has dropped, because not all clients liked being in the middle of a food fight.
However "we might have some innovation in the food delivery system of our hotel chain"
This is really relative to the size of that innovation, isn't it?
This is exactly how startups and VC funding works, isn't it? You have an idea, give you cash to burn to prove the idea and business model. Many teams and ideas fail. But some small number of unicorns produce outsized returns to keep the whole thing going.
It's how it does work, often.
It's not how it should work, because food fights are stupid and have no upside.
Even if everyone else is having them.
It's not a fair analogy because AI isn't completely stupid, and there are situations where it does provide a benefit.
But a rational business would ask if the upside is worth the cost, if the pipeline can be restructured to concentrate and amplify the benefits, if some elements are better being done the old way, if there are strategic threats if tokens become much more expensive, and so on.
Instead we're getting a wave of "Cut workers, cut costs, derp" and that's as far as the "thinking" goes.
The worst thing about AI is that it shows how shallow and stupid current C-suites are.
The US used to have real tech visionaries. Now it has tech cargo cultists, all chasing an IPO cash out and hoping the music doesn't stop before they get their bag.
Imagine you employ me as a hotel manager, and I come to you and say: "sure I spent all our food budget internationally in three months, but we invented this new dish and now our restaurant is the hottest in town. Sure 95% of the food was wasted but now we can stop the waste and keep the popular dish."
Ok, but was that your intention in the first place? or was it to have food fights.
Thats the problem here. The idea is that we can build more stuff, quickly.
However in uber's case, they just burnt loads of money to push a metric that wasn't really related to productivity.
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> some innovation will arise
Absolutely, but most management are not leaders, the moment someone pushes the idea to stack rank based on token usage, it gets approved and some genuine people will be impacted.
Post-ZIRP era proved there are very few strong leaders, before that everyone was behaving like they're most amazing leader because they read some books and raised $10M
Sure, indiscriminate tokenmaxxing is a gamble that can pay off sometimes. However, I think that the decision to take any gamble should be made by someone who will bear responsibility for the downside as well as the upside. I would prefer to search for new usages in a more strategic way. I agree that experimentation is a great way to learn if done intelligently and with limits. Full “Monte Carlo” makes sense when ops are cheap enough. It seems some orgs don’t think tokens are cheap enough yet.
I think this is very, very hard for orgs to do.
Looking back at the Internet, who would have thought that it would eventually create a Netflix, Amazon, Shopify, Spotify, Google Maps, etc. Just wild the things that ended up coming out of pushing bits over a wire with few simple protocols.
In an ideal world, you make strategic bets, but I can also see the case for the opposite this early in the lifecycle of a technology. You just don't know until you try.
Mid/late 2023, it wasn't at all obvious that it would take over coding that fast.
People talked about streaming years before Netflix. Online maps apps date back to the 1990s. E-commerce as well.
I definitely get the impression that many people thought it would eventually create shopping, streaming, and mapping sites.
I think people were less likely to have predicted things like social media or YouTube, though those weren't ideas sprung from a vacuum either.
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> Some devs in my org have fully embraced AI; some would not even use AI
So if the people who embrace AI areore successful then the others will follow. Just like every other new tech. Why does AI have to be forced? What's the hurry? Especially when there's no clear example of a company jumping ahead because of their use of it.
It's idiots being driven by FUD. That's the reason.
There are definitely key windows here for innovation driven by competition.
There's also a need to quickly adopt and understand the technology; take the Internet for example. If we were talking about the Internet, forcing teams to build and publish web pages would be one valid way to get teams comfortable with the tech, the workflow, the shift in how to propagate and convey information to an audience.
Without a mandate, many teams won't adopt the Internet as a medium of information exchange because their processes work just fine and have worked for the last 20 years.
I think it's fair to put AI in a similar light. Unless teams adopt it and use it, it's hard for an org to understand how to get value out of this technology and how it affects existing processes and assumptions.
> There are definitely key windows here for innovation driven by competition.
Those were always there, and will always be there. The type of time frames people are getting anxious about now rarely work in the real world, though, where potential customers don’t just switch products/service provides unless they’re facing catastrophic outcomes if they don’t.
And AI is not making the difference there that people think. I worked on a product that entered the market as a newcomer, wooed plenty of customers, and even though everyone _wanted_ it, only customers _urgently_ looking for a solution got on board quick (within <6 months).
Ironically enough, the product pivoting to Agentic AI hard killed a ton of momentum and interest from customers, despite exciting investors.
I was programming desktop applications when the web came along. I don't remember anyone ever saying they had been mandated to program for it.
The web took off all by itself because it had a clear value proposition for some use cases.
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Seriously. No mandates at my company. In 2023 and 2024 i had access to Claude, but frankly it wasn't until 2025 that i found the models useful enough, now i use them every day. Nobody forced me. Had they forced me, I'd probably have quit. Once the tools were sufficiently mature and verifiably helpful, people like me all over the company naturally picked up the tools too.
> A lot of the tokenmaxxing is just waste, but out of that waste may arise a small number of genuinely powerful use cases
A lot of monkeys will also eventually type up Shakespeare?
Indeed, but that's not a bad thing. If monkeys can produce the next Shakespeare, that will be wildly popular and profitable for the company that did it, justifying the initial waste, just as VC does with companies as a whole.