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At least I’m not alone. My company has a vibe coded leaderboard tracking AI usage. Our token usage and number of lines changed will affect our performance rev

At least I’m not alone. My company has a vibe coded leaderboard tracking AI usage. Our token usage and number of lines changed will affect our performance review this year.

dgellow 7mo ago
Could you both name and shame?
- porridgeraisin 7mo ago
  Name pretty much any company. Every one of my friends have said their company is doing this. Across 3 countries mind you. Especially if they already use microsoft office suite. Those folks got sold copilot on a deal it seems.
  - eikenberry 7mo ago
    Opposite. Everyone of my friend's companies don't do this. They all work at smaller companies though, which I bet is the difference.
    - MeetingsBrowser 7mo ago
      I work at a smaller company that does this.
      - eikenberry 7mo ago
        Weird. I would have thought most smaller companies would not need this sort of useless metric where people know each other and know what they are doing. These things are generally the domain of larger companies where they have already dehumanized their employees and deal only with numbers.
  - Agingcoder 7mo ago
    I work for a mega corp, and our global overlord( who is ex dev) has tried Claude code at home, and figured out that generating large amounts of code comes with its own challenges - they explicitly don’t want this to happen so there’s no such metric.
georgemcbay 7mo ago
> Our token usage and number of lines changed will affect our performance review this year. The AI-era equivalent of that old Dilbert strip about rewarding developers directly for fixing bugs ("I'm gonna write me a new mini-van this afternoon!") just substitute intentional bug creation with setting up a simple agent loop to burn tokens on random unnecessary refactoring.
jrjeksjd8d 7mo ago
I have started using the most token-intensive model I can find and asking for complicated tasks (rewrite this large codebase, review the resulting code, etc.) The agent will churn in a loop for a good 15-20 minutes and make the leaderboard number go up. The result is verbose and useless but it satisfies the metrics from leadership.
- MeetingsBrowser 7mo ago
  Congrats on becoming AI native
- phist_mcgee 7mo ago
  How much do you think that's costing?
  - jrjeksjd8d 7mo ago
    It's very opaque to me what we actually pay for tokens. We are aggressively focused on cutting costs everywhere except AI though.
dannersy 7mo ago
This is insane.
paganel 7mo ago
> Our token usage and number of lines changed will affect our performance review this year. I'm going nuts, because as I was "growing up" as a programmer (that was 20+ years ago) it was stuff like this [1] that made me (and people like me) proud to be called a computer programmer. Copy-pasting it in here, for future reference, and because things have turned out so bleak: > They devised a form that each engineer was required to submit every Friday, which included a field for the number of lines of code that were written that week. (...) > Bill Atkinson, the author of Quickdraw and the main user interface designer, who was by far the most important Lisa implementer, thought that lines of code was a silly measure of software productivity. He thought his goal was to write as small and fast a program as possible, and that the lines of code metric only encouraged writing sloppy, bloated, broken code. (...) > He was just putting the finishing touches on the optimization when it was time to fill out the management form for the first time. When he got to the lines of code part, he thought about it for a second, and then wrote in the number: -2000. [1] https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html

At least I’m not alone. My company has a vibe coded leaderboard tracking AI usage. Our token usage and number of lines changed will affect our performance review this year.

dgellow 7mo ago

Could you both name and shame?

porridgeraisin 7mo ago
Name pretty much any company. Every one of my friends have said their company is doing this. Across 3 countries mind you. Especially if they already use microsoft office suite. Those folks got sold copilot on a deal it seems.
- eikenberry 7mo ago
  Opposite. Everyone of my friend's companies don't do this. They all work at smaller companies though, which I bet is the difference.
  - MeetingsBrowser 7mo ago
    I work at a smaller company that does this.
    - eikenberry 7mo ago
      Weird. I would have thought most smaller companies would not need this sort of useless metric where people know each other and know what they are doing. These things are generally the domain of larger companies where they have already dehumanized their employees and deal only with numbers.
- Agingcoder 7mo ago
  I work for a mega corp, and our global overlord( who is ex dev) has tried Claude code at home, and figured out that generating large amounts of code comes with its own challenges - they explicitly don’t want this to happen so there’s no such metric.

georgemcbay 7mo ago

> Our token usage and number of lines changed will affect our performance review this year. The AI-era equivalent of that old Dilbert strip about rewarding developers directly for fixing bugs ("I'm gonna write me a new mini-van this afternoon!") just substitute intentional bug creation with setting up a simple agent loop to burn tokens on random unnecessary refactoring.

jrjeksjd8d 7mo ago

I have started using the most token-intensive model I can find and asking for complicated tasks (rewrite this large codebase, review the resulting code, etc.) The agent will churn in a loop for a good 15-20 minutes and make the leaderboard number go up. The result is verbose and useless but it satisfies the metrics from leadership.

MeetingsBrowser 7mo ago
Congrats on becoming AI native
phist_mcgee 7mo ago
How much do you think that's costing?
- jrjeksjd8d 7mo ago
  It's very opaque to me what we actually pay for tokens. We are aggressively focused on cutting costs everywhere except AI though.

dannersy 7mo ago

This is insane.

paganel 7mo ago

> Our token usage and number of lines changed will affect our performance review this year. I'm going nuts, because as I was "growing up" as a programmer (that was 20+ years ago) it was stuff like this [1] that made me (and people like me) proud to be called a computer programmer. Copy-pasting it in here, for future reference, and because things have turned out so bleak: > They devised a form that each engineer was required to submit every Friday, which included a field for the number of lines of code that were written that week. (...) > Bill Atkinson, the author of Quickdraw and the main user interface designer, who was by far the most important Lisa implementer, thought that lines of code was a silly measure of software productivity. He thought his goal was to write as small and fast a program as possible, and that the lines of code metric only encouraged writing sloppy, bloated, broken code. (...) > He was just putting the finishing touches on the optimization when it was time to fill out the management form for the first time. When he got to the lines of code part, he thought about it for a second, and then wrote in the number: -2000. [1] https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html