Comment by toasty228
1 day ago
You'd be surprised, I know a few devs in very big tech companies, not faang but you definitely know them, and they all have some kind of token leaderboards, a few told their dev "we don't want you to write a single line of code manually anymore", etc.
I assume the execs perspective is something like: if the top 20% of worker produce 80% of the code with LLMs and the company still works then we can get rid of the bottom 80% of devs and save money
But even if the end goal was to lay off 80% of programmers, shouldn't the 20% to keep be the developers delivering the 80% of the code, regardless of whether they spent the most to do it? Like what if the 20% of workers spending the most tokens were actually the bottom 20% in terms of delivery because they were using the worst prompts and having AI constantly implement 5 different versions of everything, then throwing it all out because their prompt was so bad anyway?
Ah, but "who uses the most tokens" is a number, a number generated by a computer no less. Questions like who delivers lots of high quality work require you to do research and make judgements, which is work.
Problem is that those 20% depend on the code reviews of the 80% for some form of pushback.
I think there's probably something to token use as some kind of metric. If you aren't using these tools much, you're definitely not going to remain a top contributor. The world is evolving quickly here.
But it's just one signal out of many, and more isn't somehow inherently better beyond a certain point.