this post was submitted on 12 May 2026
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When your boss ranks you based on the number of tokens you burn, there's no choice.
Ohoho, I know exactly how to burn a silly amount of tokens if I want to, which is why that metric is absolutely garbage - arguably worse than ranking developer performance by SLOC committed.
If your metric is usage, it is incredibly easy to game, just send agents on wild goose chases all day long and never accept the results.
Part of the scoring at my company is how many generated lines of code you accept.
Going back to the beginning of the year, I think I’m up to 6
Have it write all of your logging code for you, it may be inaccurate but it is the least damaging place to take the hit as you can just manually search in the source code for where the print was from. They always do something stupid and non uniform making most statements traceable indirectly.
This makes my ops guys cry.
Still too much effort.
Automate a script to send AI agents on goose chases for you.
It's not about effort as much as it is about keeping your job, while not injecting chaos into a code base.
I just don't imagine any company actually using tokens as a metric
Happened to a friend of mine at his company. It seems the company wanted to justify their subscription costs.
I'm sure if you are corpo-brained (brain dead) enough it makes sense. AI = magic efficiency machine, therefore an employee that uses more tokens = more efficient worker. Of course, in practice most competent people affected by this policy at his company started burning tokens with wild goose chases when they needed to increase that metric.
/model opus
write a script that RO dumps my production datastores 1gb at a time
use this script and review all my production data and look for cost savings.
You can send it into deeper rabbitholes than that without even coming close to your prod stack
well yeah, but it might actually find something interesting :)
He's a product head at an AI company, as per the article. He is a boss.
While I agree, Every boss, has a boss. Even the CEO's have bosses.
Until you get to Mambino, the boss of bosses!
Only if the company is publicly traded
VCs are bosses in the private ones.
HEY CLAUDE! OPENCLAW!
There, tokens gone.