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This is what inspired me to build my new CLI tool, Burn, Baby, Burn (https://github.com/dtnewman/burn-baby-burn/tree/main).

(If you are a VP at Amazon, yes, I'll consider acquisition offers. I'm also working on an enterprise version of this with additional features.)

Show HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48151287

I know some that was told to try and use AI more on the job so they created some agent to just burn tokens and ended up using about 10x what the next highest employee used. Buddy expected to get shit but instead got an accolade and was asked to give a short talk to the other employees about how they could match their success.

At my company we were told AI spend was part of perf review and that the "singularity" had happened. Now 20% of our infrastructure spend is tokens. The average number of pull requests per dev per week increased with all this spend. From 4.2 to 5.1. And that includes a huge chunk of PRs that are just agents changing a line or two in a config. It's all magical thinking

> It feels like all of big tech (and some smaller firms) have simultaneously gone insane.

Some companies might just have been scammed by the marketing that told them that AI would make all their employees 10,000x more productive and save them billions and when that didn't happen the assumption was that it's because employees weren't using the magical AI as often as they should be.

Other companies, especially those working on their own AI products, might want employees to use AI as much as possible because they hope it will provide them with the training data they'll need to eventually replace most or all of those employees with the AI. Punishing workers who refuse to train their AI replacement might make sense to them because even though it's costly right now they expect the savings down the road to be much much greater.

My dad worked at a company that had their own travel agency (early 90s when you needed a travel agent for reasons that no longer apply), and he was often booked on the more expensive flight because the travel agency made more money. More than once he could have got first class for less on a different flight but company policy didn't allow him to fly first class.

We have always been living in bonkers time.

Exactly this.

And the fact that it is an industry-wide meme at this point makes bright red flashing lights and klaxons go off on my mind that a catastrophic reckoning can't be too far. There's not enough money in the world to keep this up for too long.

Look it might seem silly, but the point is to get all our employees to be travel-pilled. They just don't know how great travel is yet.

I think a lot of these execs have equity in Anthropic... and the dumb ones that don't are just "keeping up with the Joneses" so to speak.

Bragging about token usage is like bragging about LoC written.

This would be hilarious if a bunch of companies did not already do exactly this with exec travel. And academics do this all the time when travel has to be funded from grants.

One reason it works out like that for travel funding is that it’s often the ‘use it or lose it’ kind of funding. If you do not use all of the funds allotted, you can’t ask for more and could realistically get less.

It seems like a natural result. People have been trying to use dashboards / metrics to roll up / indicate how well teams and individuals have been doing for a long time. Therefore, "part 1" was already in place. Now, something even easier to track is available (token usage). So, just throw token usage on the dashboard and tell people that higher is better - what other outcome would you possibly expect?

Even as a very happy NVDA shareholder I agree with you. It's comical that managers are being so naïve as to think that you can crap out a dashboard of "tokens consumed per week" and get any useful signal at all from it, beyond learning who's not using AI.

Incompetent use of a coding agent, or just general shenanigans, can burn tokens all day but it's not going to get tickets done.

Just looking at the work output - how many story points, tickets, how many new bugs are opened, etc. has not become any less relevant a metric for productivity with AI. If you're a skilled and proper user of AI those numbers would be changing in the right direction, compared to before you had it.

It's more like "We really value face-to-face interaction, so we're going to track that with your total travel spend. We don't want to get in the way, so there's no budget."

Good time to be a sane company then. "Never interrupt your opponent while he is in the middle of making a mistake." and all.

I kind of get what they're thinking in trying to make sure all engineers use AI. For myself, and for the engineers working with me, I saw everyone go through an initial aversion and resistance to AI, and then an instant productivity boost when we started using them. So there's definitely a good reason to get everybody to start using AI. You don't want a good engineer resisting AI indefinitely if you know it will make them more productive.

Incentivizing people who are already using AI to use as many tokens as possible does seem a little crazy, though.

Management has confided in me that token usage is a secret performance metric. At the same time I'm getting emails from infrastructure people about prompting techniques to get LLMs to speak more concisely to save the company money lmao. I'd prefer a video essay mode that bulks everything up.

Two years ago everyone would have told you that 'impact' was the way to measure people, and been aghast at tracking inputs like hours. Say what you will, but at least showing up at 8 didn't cost the company money. Today I see people spending time and money vibe coding tools in search of a problem, just to spend tokens and demonstrate that they're on board with the singularity.

> Imagine if your CEO woke up one day and told the company: "We need to encourage travel spending. Please book as many business trips as you can, and spend as much money as possible.

I had a manager like this once. He didn't last very long, but it was without a doubt the most fun six months of my career.

You mean like using lines of code as a metric to rank engineers [1]?

Managers love metrics. Bad managers particularly love metrics. Tokens used was almost the obvious bad metric that was going to be used.

I would argue that tokens used has actually exposed a useful metric: any manager who focused on this, demanded this or ranked based on this should be fired, for being a bad manager.

[1]: https://evan-soohoo.medium.com/did-elon-musk-really-fire-peo...

It’s preposterous, companies are blindly funding slop and the product is fool’s gold.

because it's come to CFO's as "free debt" aka fiat printing. They need to spend thisfree fiat to keep buble going. I'm sure some inv. banking team internally assured too. $Trillion instuitions have access to free printer now, you and I don't. This is different world since unlimited printer started in 2020. All debt math is fake now because they can create fiat money out of nothing, literally.

You'd be surprised...

I worked for an international (mothership in the UK, later acquired by the US) company, which had... sort of a similar policy.

So, the (mothership) company acquired a lot of satellite companies, all in banking business. All over the world. Then they figured their CEO was corrupt, got in problems with the law, got kicked out. While they were waiting for the new "real" CEO to step in, they let some "interim" CEO to take his place.

New new (interim) CEO didn't seem to have a clue about the business she was supposed to run, nor did she care. She knew her time was running out, and she figured she'd spend it traveling the world and partaking in fine dining in every corner of the world the company's tentacle could reach. But, to make it seem more plausible, she, sort of, created a policy of "experience exchange", which sent random troupes of select individuals from different branches of the company to "exchange experience" with another similarly randomly assembled troupe. Of course, the company picked the bill when it comes to lodging and dining.

Our inconsequential branch in Israel saw a pilgrimage of high-ranking banking managers from all over the world, but, mostly the wealthier parts of it. Some didn't even bother to show up in the office though, and proceeded straight to the banquet hall of the most expensive hotel on the Tel Aviv beach.

To be fair though, the interim CEO got the boot even before her time was supposed to end, but it was serendipitously close to the acquisition by the US company, and so she was let go as part of a "restructuring" and "optimization"... but it was a crazy year!

I'm making sure to use the most expensive model possible for the stupidest shit constantly. They asked for it!

I've definitely been in situations where managers tell me to "spend X amount before the end of the year." They don't want higher ups to think they can cut our budget.

It's like if class-based society materialized within the IT. And the manager class collectively pushes the narrative of AI replacing ICs.

Note that it has beaten capitalism, making rational choices to increase earnings has lost to this AI dream.

I wonder where in business school they teach you to "measure inputs and try to maximize them", because that's basically what's happening.

Nonsense. It’s a little bit of a loss leader so devs are hooked on it and it’s considered incredibly unproductive to work without one. Then they will just have 10 peoples jobs replaced with one guy.

People think we’re living in oh so capitalist times, why then does everything smell soviet.

IMO, the investors behind AI play the Uber game: they subsidise the AI costs and inject it into all facets of society they can get their hands on. They can tell the execs to increase AI usage at any cost. Their bet is that we'll become AI addicts with athrophied brains before they run out of money.

Also, don't forget that their datacenters will burn our electricity and boil our rivers at rates much cheaper than what we are billed in our homes. So while you're happy generating mountains of AI slop, somewhere there is a datacenter boiling a river.

I'd compare this to a new patented formula of water that's nobody asked for, and the patent owners are trying to replace all water supply with their crap before we wake up.

If we suddenly went from rail travel to jets that's exactly what would happen. We'd go from 0 to all the business flights that happen today. Everyone would be under enormous pressure to not be a laggard.

I notice a lot of Cursor's suggestions are just stuff a linter should auto-fix.

But if you hit "tab" it'll claim that as an AI-edited line, LOL.

(A lot of the rest of it is stuff I could already have been doing just as fast if I'd ever bothered to learn to use multiple cursors, learned vim navigation, or set up some macros—I never did because my getting-code-on-the-screen speed without those has never been slow enough to hold anything up, in practice)

I still don't know how to reconcile these reports with what other people say about GenAI-agentic assisted engineering being the only way of working nowadays, especially in startups.

Probably there is no dichotomy going on and it depends on multiple factors, but it seems so weird to see reports that are so different between each other.

I think you'll find that a lot of big investment companies are buried to the hilt in a lot of tech companies and also OpenAI and Anthropic. So you can do the math on where the directive is coming from and why it's not particularly careful or measured.

> "You've used AI to do something that was a single command."

As time passes and the layers of abstraction pile up, later generations won't understand the underlying layers of the abstraction. This is a huge weakness in our systems development -- and a huge potential attack surface for adversaries.

> You've used AI to do something that was a single command

Yes, and that’s a good thing! This is in fact where a lot of AI value lies. You dont need to know that command anymore - knowing the functional contract is now sufficient to perform the requisite work duties. This is huge!

Fellow FAANG. We have weekly manager meetings where leadership encourages us to increase token usage. We do push back, and leadership acknowledges that token spend is not a great metric and people are likely to game it... and then go right back to encouraging us to increase token spend in our teams.

We have token tracking dashboards that leadership is looking at. I know because they show us in these manager meetings. Haven't opened them to everyone yet as some kind of leaderboard, so at least that's nice.

Lots of rumors token spend will be involved in perf reviews. Leadership denies it... but then holds more meetings telling us how important it is to increase our token spend and discussing inadequacies from the token spend dashboards.

I'm in a large-ish peer group for engineering managers. AI token over-use is a growing problem.

The problem explodes at any company that puts up a token use leaderboard or hints that they might do layoffs for engineers that refuse to use AI tools. This triggers a race to use as many tokens as possible to stay ahead.

Anecdotally, the problem is worst among devs who read a lot of social media. Twitter, Threads, Mastodon, LinkedIn, and others are filled with recycled viral stories about companies going AI-native and firing people who don't use enough AI. Anxieties are high right now so nervous developers see this and think they must burn tokens faster than their peers to avoid an inevitable culling.

I recently left a FAANG. Shortly before I left (for unrelated reasons) the director of my org got scolded by the VP he reported to because token usage in his org was low. After that the ICs in my org were told to use ai for everything or there could be consequences for their careers.

Enterprise consulting here, it is getting ridiculous, with forced trainings, workshops and hacktons to motivate use of AI in daily activities.

Stuff that could be easily done as shell scripts gets asked how could we make an agent out of it.

In our place it is really a thing and comes from leadership. They feel like they spent a lot on copilot and they want to see people using it.

I feel like it depends on the leader. I've definitely seen leaders value LoC beyond reason and cause worse, bloated codebases by rewarding cowboys with 10k line PRs.

Big companies have thousands of leaders. Many good, many bad.

My friend at Google says they have a "ai-usage" dashboard that tracks everyone's ai token usage as well as aggregated per team, per org, etc. There's a sign on it that says "don't use this for perf reviews!" but I think everyone knows that that's exactly what they're going to use it for.

I've been noticing how our economy keeps getting more Soviet as it becomes more top-down. We basically have central planning now with all the pathologies inherent in that system, but unlike the soviets we just have a bunch of guys who happened to get rich or bribe the right people running our GOSPLAN.

No worries, we keep drinking from paper straws, because that is what really matters.

The problem with not burning tokens is when you not meet the performance KPIs, get labelled as luddite and off you go, even before the job gets taken over by AI.

I do agree with the sentiment, that and war mongers destroying the planet.

This is why we're clear-cutting forests to build new data centers? Not even for "real" productivity gains, but just for the sake of using the tokens.

> USSR nearly made whales extinct

USSR barely accounted for 15% of the world caught amount (with Japan as the leader).

> that nobody wanted to eat

unsubstantiated.

Yeah but what can we do. I don't want to be punished by work either.

Luckily I work in app management and I know they can only see the last date used so if I just put in one query per day I'm good.

But I'm so sick and tired of this AI hype :(

We didn't. The USSR had 100% employment long ago[0], and all the poverty that goes with it.

This isn't like that, as it isn't funded through taxes. This is private companies experimenting with their money, and risking downstream cost increases that may cause people to go elsewhere, as they do when they try anything new.

This is much better than just funding people regardless of productivity through forced taxes.

[0] https://nintil.com/the-soviet-union-achieving-full-employmen...

That is exactly the point. It may be wasteful, but it's the fastest way to explore how AI may actually be useful to your business. Even if 80% of employees are just wasting tokens, you still have 20% who are figuring it out.

I'm sorry, but that's insane. I mean, I guess if you have cash to burn I could think of even worse ways to spend it, but seriously, this is dumb. What other tool have businesses spent millions of dollars and person hours on to try and find something useful the tool can do?? Talk about a solution looking for a problem! If it's not clear in the early stages that this tool solves a problem then ditch it and move on! Give that extra cash to your employees and shareholders instead!

I have heard from multiple people at smaller to medium sized orgs where token usage and AI adoption are a central part of performance reviews.

Yeah my manager at my 400 people company is one of those. He runs gas town and his agents bump things here and there throughout the codebase and he has like 50 commits a day. Compat versions, formatting, stuff like that.

But the thing is, the problem is the person, not the technology. He was already like this before LLMs. He would "refactor" repos into smaller repos, and all of a sudden all of the code has his name. If you just skim, it looks like he build a huge chunk of the codebase in the company. He also has a history of saying no to stuff I want to do, then he does it himself. Also nitpick my PRs to no end (or straight says he doesn't think he should do that thing) and then he turns around and implements it himself. He doesn't copy paste my code, but he does re-implement himself the same ideas that he just said no to after my PR was open. Very smart guy, very dishonest. But he's good at being dishonest. If you ask him about it he says "oh I just though that this way would be more organized" or something like that. From the outside you could make the argument that one way is better than the other (for reasons I would claim are irrelevant), so it's not obvious that he's being dishonest. But since I see 100% of what he does, it's entirely clear to me that this is a pattern.

EDIT: just remembered another one. One time I asked him to take a specific week of holidays. He didnt say "no" but he did mention that we're under a lot of pressure to deliver The Thing, and if I would delay my holidays. I said "No, I'm not going to delay them", so he approved it. Then when the time came around, he took holidays in the same week. On this one I didn't challenge him, I already know him well enough to know the truth which is he's no ashamed to ask from others things that he would never himself accept.

But does Goodhearts law apply to things that were never a good measure to start with :)

"Absolutely anything that keeps users on our app longer is good!"

Slack will start serving porn next.

Just like return-to-office is there to maintain real estate value.

At least that nominally creates some value at the end of the day. Documentation is the thing everyone wants but no one has time/desire to create. My most recent token heavy task was having an agent write unit tests for coverage on a little graphAPI tool I'd written a bit ago to satisfy SonarQube.

There's really no end to dot-language diagrams you can have it make. Call graphs, package dependency maps, let it try to figure out an architecture diagram, whatever.

Right, the leaderboard is internal.

Anecdotal, but appears to be common among other comments in the thread.

For companies doing this there is no 'justify the expenditure'. Employees are being praised for high expenditure, regardless of actual outcome.

Leadership see the problem as 'people resisting AI'. Embracing AI is seen as the solution, and token usage is seen as the measure of success.

Amazon runs anthropic models in it's own DCs with Bedrock.

Similar situation here! In fact our team has a no-LLM policy that I'm quite happy with. We did experiment with it, to the point that one of our seniors atrophied so badly we had to let him go, and we're still paying down some of the slop residue...

Advanced Circular flows

If I own part of a company, and I spend money on their goods, and a result their revenues climb and consequently my valuation does too - then my firm value will be higher.

This would also explain the gung-ho approach. Some pretty devious financial engineering akin to arbitrage

The type of leadership judging employee performance by token burn are usually doing it because they don’t have a clue how to judge performance so they’re just taking what they read on linkedin or their local cto roundtable about more AI = more better and turning it into a metric on the thing that makes a simple number.

High token usage does not mean high token usage in the same session / context window. But yeah, context rot hits hard, I find that with Codex/GPT5.4 after about 50% context window usage it's hard to get anything useful out of it on a moderately sized codebase.

> This is analogous to measuring productivity by LoC output

True, but it looks like productivity to people whose own productivity is measured by how busy their subordinates appear to be.

You should probably create an agent to make agents whose jobs are to figure out how to maximize the token usage (and one whose job is to calculate the minimum token usage, so it doesn't look like a boondoggle).

Hell, I'd resign.

But, I can't figure out how to put my job back into command mode :-(

this one is legit the right call, though

Especially a measure that's so easily manipulated.

I was just going to invoke Goodhart's Law

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law

Crappy managers don’t know (or actively avoid) how to measure business value from individuals. So they need you to be in the office so they can physically see if you are putting in the effort.

Tokens is just yet another proxy for business value.

The problem they face is if everybody is judge by business value in dollars, crappy managers are the first to go

I think it's mixed. I have seen people with really good use cases and the opposite. It feels like the AWS/GCP situation all over again. Step 1: "this is amazing tech we need to leverage it immediately, use it as much as you can" Step 2: "oh shit this is getting expensive and I'm not sure of the ROI". We are approaching step 2