5 ms·

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 cheap

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.

kleiba2 5mo ago
Citation needed.
throwatdem12311 5mo ago
I’m an “old millenial” and the excessive burning of tokens will continue until working conditions improve.
- voidfunc 5mo ago
  Working conditions are fine, I simply am not incentivized to be efficient with tokens.
  - throwatdem12311 5mo ago
    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.
    - Esophagus4 5mo ago
      > on a PiP because your token burn is low Does this happen? I’ve never been at a company that measures employee performance by token burn targets. I suspect most companies don’t do that, but I could be wrong obviously.
      - hnthrow0287345 5mo ago
        I doubt it, but I've seen dumber stuff like laying off people because they think AI will replace them
      - throwatdem12311 5mo ago
        I know people that were laid off because they were low on the “token leaderboard” so yes it happens.
      - Freedom2 5mo ago
        I have friends who work at both large and small companies, as well as startups, and more often than not this is the case. Surprisingly, those who work at a YC startup face the PIP quite regularly for not enough token usage.
- OnionBlender 5mo ago
  I prefer "Elder Millennial". https://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/boomer-shooters https://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/boomer-shooters
6stringmerc 5mo ago
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.
- fullshark 5mo ago
  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.
  - groestl 5mo ago
    Maybe managers going back to coding.
- CuriouslyC 5mo ago
  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.
SupLockDef 5mo ago
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.
- kombookcha 5mo ago
  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.
  - cluckindan 5mo ago
    You get what you measure.
  - Arodex 5mo ago
    >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.
    - kombookcha 5mo ago
mayhemducks 5mo ago
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.
- customguy 5mo ago
  > 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.
  - mayhemducks 5mo ago
    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.
    - customguy 5mo ago
      Right, because every $100 spent on tokens results in more than $100 of profit from NVIDIA stock. That totally makes sense. But why so indirect, why not buy NVIDIA GPU and trash them? That should increase profit even more, since you're cutting out the middlemen. All that aside, refusal to participate in bullshit doesn't imply some "plan" to bring the company down, it's really just refusing bullshit. It's not "5D bullshit", i.e. a move in the same bullshit game they are refusing And if you offer someone 5 bucks to help burn down their own house, that of all their friends, so someone can make 5000 bucks, then they might just refuse, not because they have some plan, but precisely because refusal or letting themselves get hollowed out as well is the only option they're given. It's not like any of the hollowed out people listen to them in earnest. Young people, which is crazy to me, often want some kind of stake and participation in the world rather than being disposable slaves, they want to do work that makes sense, that enables them and others to grow and prosper, in order to prepare them to become stewards of that world later on, which they want to make better and not just exploit, generally. Mostly, some of them of course are assholes or stupid, but in general, people come to this world way less fucked up than the world wants them to be.
qsort 5mo ago
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.
- CuriouslyC 5mo ago
  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-half-gen-z-workers-113500240.html https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/nearly...
  - Verdex 5mo ago
    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.
    - CuriouslyC 5mo ago
      If I want to create a web app with a back-end, database, and some services, and I tell codex to do that with a specific stack and using specific paradigms to keep the code performant and maintainable, it's still a win over coding it by hand, as models can emit ~200char/sec compared with maybe ~10 for a really fast human. There's up front planning cost, and you will have to go back and massage some of the outputs a little bit if you're particular, but for sizeable tasks it still comes out to be a big win. If you're just working on a single react component or an algorithm to do stuff with data, there's less chance to amortize the up front planning and verification so it comes out more of a wash.
dgellow 5mo ago
I haven't seen Anthropic pushing tokenmaxxing things. That seems to come mostly from AI consumers, not from the AI labs themselves

kleiba2 5mo ago

Citation needed.

throwatdem12311 5mo ago

I’m an “old millenial” and the excessive burning of tokens will continue until working conditions improve.

voidfunc 5mo ago
Working conditions are fine, I simply am not incentivized to be efficient with tokens.
- throwatdem12311 5mo ago
  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.
  - Esophagus4 5mo ago
    > on a PiP because your token burn is low Does this happen? I’ve never been at a company that measures employee performance by token burn targets. I suspect most companies don’t do that, but I could be wrong obviously.
    - hnthrow0287345 5mo ago
      I doubt it, but I've seen dumber stuff like laying off people because they think AI will replace them
    - throwatdem12311 5mo ago
      I know people that were laid off because they were low on the “token leaderboard” so yes it happens.
    - Freedom2 5mo ago
      I have friends who work at both large and small companies, as well as startups, and more often than not this is the case. Surprisingly, those who work at a YC startup face the PIP quite regularly for not enough token usage.
OnionBlender 5mo ago
I prefer "Elder Millennial". https://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/boomer-shooters https://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/boomer-shooters

6stringmerc 5mo ago

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.

fullshark 5mo ago
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.
- groestl 5mo ago
  Maybe managers going back to coding.
CuriouslyC 5mo ago
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.

SupLockDef 5mo ago

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.

kombookcha 5mo ago
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.
- cluckindan 5mo ago
  You get what you measure.
- Arodex 5mo ago
  >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.
  - kombookcha 5mo ago

mayhemducks 5mo ago

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.

customguy 5mo ago
> 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.
- mayhemducks 5mo ago
  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.
  - customguy 5mo ago
    Right, because every $100 spent on tokens results in more than $100 of profit from NVIDIA stock. That totally makes sense. But why so indirect, why not buy NVIDIA GPU and trash them? That should increase profit even more, since you're cutting out the middlemen. All that aside, refusal to participate in bullshit doesn't imply some "plan" to bring the company down, it's really just refusing bullshit. It's not "5D bullshit", i.e. a move in the same bullshit game they are refusing And if you offer someone 5 bucks to help burn down their own house, that of all their friends, so someone can make 5000 bucks, then they might just refuse, not because they have some plan, but precisely because refusal or letting themselves get hollowed out as well is the only option they're given. It's not like any of the hollowed out people listen to them in earnest. Young people, which is crazy to me, often want some kind of stake and participation in the world rather than being disposable slaves, they want to do work that makes sense, that enables them and others to grow and prosper, in order to prepare them to become stewards of that world later on, which they want to make better and not just exploit, generally. Mostly, some of them of course are assholes or stupid, but in general, people come to this world way less fucked up than the world wants them to be.

qsort 5mo ago

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.

CuriouslyC 5mo ago
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-half-gen-z-workers-113500240.html https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/nearly...
- Verdex 5mo ago
  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.
  - CuriouslyC 5mo ago
    If I want to create a web app with a back-end, database, and some services, and I tell codex to do that with a specific stack and using specific paradigms to keep the code performant and maintainable, it's still a win over coding it by hand, as models can emit ~200char/sec compared with maybe ~10 for a really fast human. There's up front planning cost, and you will have to go back and massage some of the outputs a little bit if you're particular, but for sizeable tasks it still comes out to be a big win. If you're just working on a single react component or an algorithm to do stuff with data, there's less chance to amortize the up front planning and verification so it comes out more of a wash.

dgellow 5mo ago

I haven't seen Anthropic pushing tokenmaxxing things. That seems to come mostly from AI consumers, not from the AI labs themselves