Comment by CuriouslyC
8 days ago
This is almost entirely on Anthropic and the stupid C suite people trying to push TokenMaxxing. GPT5.5 is much more token efficient, other models are much cheaper, and if used in moderation rather than than trying to get everyone to OpenClaw 24/7 with token leaderboards, it's much more economical.
Also ironically, a lot of GenZ and young Millenials who were already bitter at their employers have used the tokenmaxxing push to sabotage the AI rollouts by burning tokens on stupid shit. It seems to be working.
Are you saying that making a leaderboard of who is spending the most is going to be expensive?
They couldn't see that coming, but for sure they can predict how the future will be when it's time to sell their "visions" of the world.
Meanwhile, sheep's are going to believe and max their token usage with their own wallet. "You are so be left behind if you're not".
It's a mass psychosis. The only winners here are the hardware manufacturers, like nvidia for instance.
The other day I had to read a C-suite guy share how he had an epiphany that spending more tokens did not linearly align with more useful features being output by the teams. He was describing it as this breakthrough moment for him, as if it wasn't glaringly obvious that making the KPI "spend more tokens" would result in inefficient token spending, not massive value for the customer.
It's baffling how these people have entirely shut their ears to all the obvious warnings about this, and are now congratulating themselves for their slightly less psychotic outlook and pivoting to blaming the workers for inefficient usage, after specifically forcing them to tokenmaxx.
>It's baffling how these people have entirely shut their ears to all the obvious warnings about this, and are now congratulating themselves for their slightly less psychotic outlook and pivoting to blaming the workers for inefficient usage, after specifically forcing them to tokenmaxx.
It's not baffling. They are a caste, wholly insulated from the consequences of their own actions.
Almost every company is run in a basic dictatorial way. We almost never discuss it, when there is a wide corpus of political Science analysing the pros and cons of governance models that certainly puts it at the bottom.
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This entire narrative is just made up. Managers know not to reward spending. At best you had some tracking to see who was using it and encouragement for those that aren't to start.
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I think this is the part that kills me. This is what many grunts, including myself said from the start. More PRs and more code does not equal value for the customer.
You get what you measure.
Yes, I think in that way it is dumb. But in another way I think it could be justified as a way to try and blaze some new trails and see what's possible by having users not worry about cost in the beginning.
Sure most token burning ends up being a waste but some ideas pan out?
Not disagreeing but it's another way of looking at it IMO
I'm with you that people are insanely hyped about Claude Code in particular when e.g. Codex isn't far behind (and with recent models I actually prefer it).
But I'm going to need a citation for this:
> a lot of GenZ and young Millenials who were already bitter at their employers have used the tokenmaxxing push to sabotage the AI
The 3 people on reddit doing this don't even register on a company budget. What seems more plausible to me is that budgets were calibrated to spending before agents were actually useful, and late '25/early '26 changed the pattern significantly.
Codex is actually significantly better than Claude Code now, assuming you have a clear idea of what you want to do and how. Claude's secret sauce is that it'll run off and do stuff that's mostly right without a lot of prompting, but that also makes it willful/disobedient and causes it to be bad for "finishing" work, since it'll circle around your objective in an opinionated way.
https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/nearly...
Hey, would you mind elaborating a bit on this:
> assuming you have a clear idea of what you want to do and how
I mean, if I have a sufficiently clear idea of what and how, then surely just coding it manually would work significantly better. Unless maybe I am a painfully slow typer.
Without some level of "actually I'm not sure exactly" permitted, then I'm not really sure what LLMs bring to the table.
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I’m an “old millenial” and the excessive burning of tokens will continue until working conditions improve.
Working conditions are fine, I simply am not incentivized to be efficient with tokens.
Yeah, everything is fine until you don’t want to use AI for something because it sucks at that task and then you end up on a PiP because your token burn is low. Why the f*ck are AI Token Use Leaderboards even a thing.
Features that used to take months are now expected in days. Oh you didn’t merge 40 pull requests and deploy to prod 15 times today? Aren’t you using Opus the greatest thing since the invention of the wheel?! What do you mean it’s hard to review 100 merge requests per day? Just have Claude review it! That’s a PiP.
Oh prod is down because people keep deploying code that nobody even freakin’ read? Just have Claude fix it! What do you mean it’s doesn’t work well? Just burn more tokens or you’re on a PiP.
Surely there wouldn’t be malicious compliance by people that would prefer to use the right tool for the job instead of having this crap shoved down our throats by management by threat of termination.
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I prefer "Elder Millennial".
https://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/boomer-shooters
I haven't seen Anthropic pushing tokenmaxxing things. That seems to come mostly from AI consumers, not from the AI labs themselves
Citation needed.
Counterpoint: based on a lot of anecdotes here, the most likely people to burn tokens aren’t GenZ but managers using ChatGPT to respond to questions or otherwise as an outsourcing of their job. There aren’t enough GenZ in the workforce to back your claim in my opinion.
Token efficiency where instead of the AI burning money at 1:3 instead of 1:5 isn’t quite a winning argument.
There's no way managers using LLMs to answer emails are burning tokens at a comparable rate to someone trying to utilize inference in production systems is.
Maybe managers going back to coding.
There's the cost to do productive work, and the proportion of work which is actually productive.
GPT5.5 medium is ~20% the cost of Opus and 27% the cost of Sonnet on a task by task basis. That's a material difference.
Excessive token burning as a tactic to annoy your employer probably does the opposite - it probably makes your employer money.
The more tokens you burn, the more demand for hardware there will be. More demand for hardware means higher stock prices -> more money in your employer's pocket.
The only question is how long that can last. If taken to an extreme, the output of the AI will get worse over time, and if it gets bad enough, for long enough, people will use it less and less, and demand will slowly evaporate.
My point is NOT: I hope this all comes crashing down.
My point IS: tokenmaxing is bad. AND weaponizing it will not have the intended effect, but in fact, it will, in the short term, do the opposite.
> The more tokens you burn, the more demand for hardware there will be. More demand for hardware means higher stock prices -> more money in your employer's pocket.
If you work for NVIDIA, sure, but otherwise, this makes no sense to me.
I'm guessing you aren't invested in any of these stocks. I'm also guessing, to take the perspective of a tokenamxxing GenZ employee, that their bosses are.
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I genuinely do not understand why people think my comment on this is a bad take.
I believe it is absolutely ridiculous to have token usage leader boards.
But isn't it also ridiculous for a rational human being to use as many tokens as possible regardless of whether or not that token usage is useful or valuable?
It seems obvious to me that AI service providers make more money the more tokens are used. It also seems obvious to me that companies who sell shovels during a gold rush stand to make a great deal of money, whether or not any gold is found. How is that a good thing writ large?
Anthropic, (and SpaceX), might IPO soon - a move that will grant them access to capital instantly. Capital that comes directly from the retirement plans of all of us.
All I'm saying is if you want to somehow sabotage the game somehow, this is definitely not the right strategy. Political influence would be far more effective.
What am I missing?