4 ms·

AI mandate is one of the best things that's happened to me. It's the easiest metric to game in the world. At one point my boss asked why my AI usage was lower

AI mandate is one of the best things that's happened to me. It's the easiest metric to game in the world. At one point my boss asked why my AI usage was lower than other team members. I instantly knew what to do. Every session is now run at ultracode effort. My automated PR review bot averages like $80 in usage per PR review.

tudelo 3mo ago
It is extremely easy to burn tokens if that is required. Explore this codebase. Team x wants y feature, research and generate a full plan. What does feature x in codebase y actually mean? Analyze code coverage in x. Map out code flow and find concurrency bugs in y and on and on... Oh and my favorite: Use 5 independent subagents to review code change and summarize the findings, and for any finding determine if they are real concerns
- cevn 3mo ago
  The other day claude spun up 100 agents and took an hour to type 30k token document to tell me something was impossible to do. I googled it, found a pr on the 3rd link that showed it was possible. "You're absolutely right!!"
  - lostglass 3mo ago
    "You can't use reflection if the classes aren't in the class loader" "I see why you would think that however this should work, let's test it." -Claude, burning my company's money.
    - mikae1 3mo ago
      > Claude, burning my company's money. And the planet... While I experience some schadenfreude when reading these comments from programmers, I also can not help to wonder when this insanity will this end.
      - PowerElectronix 3mo ago
        There's nothing people run out of faster than other people's money. I expect this second half of the year we see that the cracks in the AI business grow and bring the whole thing down. Just a bit after anthropic and openAI unload the "value" of their companies into retail investors.
      - Applejinx 3mo ago
        Worse'n crypto… which I would not have believed possible.
      - ethbr1 3mo ago
        > I also can not help to wonder when this insanity will this end. When AI use starts to be a line item cost on public companies' financial reports + Anthropic and OpenAI have IPOed and have to file financials too + they kill their growth-hack monthly all-you-can-eat plans. The entire house of cards falls down when the success metric shifts from "Are you using AI?" to "What return value are you getting for the money you're spending on AI?" Some smart companies / departments are going to be able to demonstrate stellar AI ROI, but I'm going to be shocked if the bulk of current demand isn't revealed to be naked. Mostly because middle management is always stupid about adopting and using new technology.
      - marcosdumay 3mo ago
        > I also can not help to wonder when this insanity will this end. AI companies are running out of money to subsidize those queries, and worse are needing to show a profit. All while they are having a harder time to raise more money as investment. If nothing changes, things should become more rational soon. ... now... IMO, I place the odds of nothing changing very low...
- ffsm8 3mo ago
  There is value in doing all that too, though. Admittedly with strong diminishing returns, but it's there. Eg by doing that I was able to develop non-essential features which increased our quality of life for devs last month without going through our PO who'd need to price it - because that does let's you create changes in an incredibly hands off manner with miniscule amount of time investment if you already know what you want to achieve, and how the end result should be... Admittedly, that's a pretty narrow usecase which is rarely the case- but if it is...
- flowerthoughts 3mo ago
  And the more uselessly amusing thing is that the manager who requests higher tokens usage probably also doesn't care whether it's producing slop or not. Metric goes up; managers happy until CFO is reported income hasn't gone up as quickly as costs, and that makes the CEO optimistically concerned. Never expect underlying thought from a messenger. It's interesting that LLM barely had any vetting period or experimentation phase. Suddenly everyone was supposed to test it in production, it seems.
- Forgeties79 3mo ago
  Afterwards, give me 5 separate documents with 10 plans each for how to implement this. Triple check your work, make no mistakes. Then give me 3 distinct executive summaries emphasizing different areas.
- parasti 3mo ago
  Just ask it to "use a workflow" and it'll spin un dozens of agents burning your token allowance in parallel.
- reactordev 3mo ago
  Let us not forget /ralph-loop “explore the codebase for bugs, write tests for each bug found but do not fix the bug, only capture its existence in testing” will ensure your agent never stops burning tokens.
- xantronix 3mo ago
  I am of a particular disposition that makes it difficult for me to do lie about my work, especially if I were in a firm where people are reading my chat transcripts. As much as I want to stick it to The Man, it feels a lot better for me to just say "no" and burn through my 401k until this blows over. I'm not too proud to admit that this whole thing scares me though. I fail to see how anything will get better.
  - froggy 3mo ago
    Congrats, you have a moral compass and you sound raised by good parents. The other people in these threads bragging about burning tokens, not so much. I’ve sadly had the same thoughts lately to cash out my 401k and say farewell to software development. I’m hanging in for a little longer, I think the AI/greed fever breaks sometime soon (months not years).
tgv 3mo ago
That's corporate eco-terrorism. How did we sink so low?
- oblio 3mo ago
  It's even worse/better. It's corporate financial malpractice. At some point they will wake up after the AI psychosis dies down. That might take 1-2 more years. After that most companies will realize that AI is a tool, as OP said, and adjust budgets accordingly.
  - delusional 3mo ago
    Importantly, "adjusting budgets" here is for most companies, you know the ones you have to fight to even get an IDE license, a euphemism for zeroing the budget.
    - ihsw 3mo ago
      Hello, I am from a company whose IT leadership that saw this silliness 3 months ago. Yes, all developer-focused AI subscriptions have been cancelled, and only AI features tacked onto existing subscriptions are part of the AI strategy (eg: Jira+AI, Confluence+AI, Analytics suite du jour+AI, Microsoft Copilot Pro (SHUDDER), etc etc etc.) Yes, it is virtually impossible to get any additional spending approved. Yes, there is no more Claude, there is no more Codex, it is all gone now. The AI hype occurs only in company-wide emails about commitment to modernization (with AI), reorganization (with AI), and consolidation (with AI), where no actual strategy is proposed other than what the management consultants advise (with a caveat that there is no budget for anything other than AI features that are tacked onto existing subscriptions at no additional cost.)
    - alfiedotwtf 3mo ago
      @ihsw you’re currently greyed out so I can’t reply, but lol holy shit i’d be updating my resume if i were you
      - oblio 3mo ago
EmanuelB 3mo ago
https://github.com/dtnewman/burn-baby-burn https://github.com/dtnewman/burn-baby-burn Get ready for that promotion!
- HiPhish 3mo ago
  I love how the images are an AI-generated fever dream. Normally I hate those things, but in this case it's a perfect match for the AI clown world.
- katzgrau 3mo ago
  The real unlock is at line 149 of bin/burn
KronisLV 3mo ago
I'd unironically like my workplace to cover AI spend for me. There's so, so much mechanically simple but time consuming refactoring that should be done but nobody ever does that because there's never enough free time. Or even various utility scripts and at least finding out of date docs (or writing very basic ones where none exist, though it'd be hard to get them not to feel like slop writing). Or figuring out what additional custom linter rules would be useful, how to improve the CI pipelines and so on. If I had the Anthropic Max 20x subscription, I could make a large part of the technical backlog disappear (relatively safely).
- swiftcoder 3mo ago
  > If I had the Anthropic Max 20x subscription Most of the tasks you have listed you could do with Haiku, GPT mini, or DeepSeek Flash. An Anthropic Max 20x subscription is considerable overkill for this sort of task.
- MaKey 3mo ago
  I've had great success with OpenCode Go and DeepSeek v4 Flash for Terraform code refactorings and extensions. It's cheap enough to pay it yourself ($5 first month, $10 afterwards). Ideally you provide the model a feedback loop (e. g. passing tests) so it can safely iterate.
- esseph 3mo ago
  There will always be more work to do, especially for someone else's company. What's the rush? Friday will still come at the same speed, and it's unlikely you will receive an increase in pay to account for your increase in productivity.
rwmj 3mo ago
It's also the easiest way to determine if your management has AI psychosis or not, and make corresponding decisions about whether to stay with the company.
- Forgeties79 3mo ago
  No one is leaving their job because their manager is too obsessed with AI. Especially not in this economy/job market.
TheOtherHobbes 3mo ago
Parkinson's Law: Work expands to fill the time available. Updated version: Tokens expand to exceed the budget available. Fantasy: automated productivity Reality: automated bullshit makework and bureaucracy

tudelo 3mo ago

It is extremely easy to burn tokens if that is required. Explore this codebase. Team x wants y feature, research and generate a full plan. What does feature x in codebase y actually mean? Analyze code coverage in x. Map out code flow and find concurrency bugs in y and on and on... Oh and my favorite: Use 5 independent subagents to review code change and summarize the findings, and for any finding determine if they are real concerns

cevn 3mo ago
The other day claude spun up 100 agents and took an hour to type 30k token document to tell me something was impossible to do. I googled it, found a pr on the 3rd link that showed it was possible. "You're absolutely right!!"
- lostglass 3mo ago
  "You can't use reflection if the classes aren't in the class loader" "I see why you would think that however this should work, let's test it." -Claude, burning my company's money.
  - mikae1 3mo ago
    > Claude, burning my company's money. And the planet... While I experience some schadenfreude when reading these comments from programmers, I also can not help to wonder when this insanity will this end.
    - PowerElectronix 3mo ago
      There's nothing people run out of faster than other people's money. I expect this second half of the year we see that the cracks in the AI business grow and bring the whole thing down. Just a bit after anthropic and openAI unload the "value" of their companies into retail investors.
    - Applejinx 3mo ago
      Worse'n crypto… which I would not have believed possible.
    - ethbr1 3mo ago
      > I also can not help to wonder when this insanity will this end. When AI use starts to be a line item cost on public companies' financial reports + Anthropic and OpenAI have IPOed and have to file financials too + they kill their growth-hack monthly all-you-can-eat plans. The entire house of cards falls down when the success metric shifts from "Are you using AI?" to "What return value are you getting for the money you're spending on AI?" Some smart companies / departments are going to be able to demonstrate stellar AI ROI, but I'm going to be shocked if the bulk of current demand isn't revealed to be naked. Mostly because middle management is always stupid about adopting and using new technology.
    - marcosdumay 3mo ago
      > I also can not help to wonder when this insanity will this end. AI companies are running out of money to subsidize those queries, and worse are needing to show a profit. All while they are having a harder time to raise more money as investment. If nothing changes, things should become more rational soon. ... now... IMO, I place the odds of nothing changing very low...
ffsm8 3mo ago
There is value in doing all that too, though. Admittedly with strong diminishing returns, but it's there. Eg by doing that I was able to develop non-essential features which increased our quality of life for devs last month without going through our PO who'd need to price it - because that does let's you create changes in an incredibly hands off manner with miniscule amount of time investment if you already know what you want to achieve, and how the end result should be... Admittedly, that's a pretty narrow usecase which is rarely the case- but if it is...
flowerthoughts 3mo ago
And the more uselessly amusing thing is that the manager who requests higher tokens usage probably also doesn't care whether it's producing slop or not. Metric goes up; managers happy until CFO is reported income hasn't gone up as quickly as costs, and that makes the CEO optimistically concerned. Never expect underlying thought from a messenger. It's interesting that LLM barely had any vetting period or experimentation phase. Suddenly everyone was supposed to test it in production, it seems.
Forgeties79 3mo ago
Afterwards, give me 5 separate documents with 10 plans each for how to implement this. Triple check your work, make no mistakes. Then give me 3 distinct executive summaries emphasizing different areas.
parasti 3mo ago
Just ask it to "use a workflow" and it'll spin un dozens of agents burning your token allowance in parallel.
reactordev 3mo ago
Let us not forget /ralph-loop “explore the codebase for bugs, write tests for each bug found but do not fix the bug, only capture its existence in testing” will ensure your agent never stops burning tokens.
xantronix 3mo ago
I am of a particular disposition that makes it difficult for me to do lie about my work, especially if I were in a firm where people are reading my chat transcripts. As much as I want to stick it to The Man, it feels a lot better for me to just say "no" and burn through my 401k until this blows over. I'm not too proud to admit that this whole thing scares me though. I fail to see how anything will get better.
- froggy 3mo ago
  Congrats, you have a moral compass and you sound raised by good parents. The other people in these threads bragging about burning tokens, not so much. I’ve sadly had the same thoughts lately to cash out my 401k and say farewell to software development. I’m hanging in for a little longer, I think the AI/greed fever breaks sometime soon (months not years).

tgv 3mo ago

That's corporate eco-terrorism. How did we sink so low?

oblio 3mo ago
It's even worse/better. It's corporate financial malpractice. At some point they will wake up after the AI psychosis dies down. That might take 1-2 more years. After that most companies will realize that AI is a tool, as OP said, and adjust budgets accordingly.
- delusional 3mo ago
  Importantly, "adjusting budgets" here is for most companies, you know the ones you have to fight to even get an IDE license, a euphemism for zeroing the budget.
  - ihsw 3mo ago
    Hello, I am from a company whose IT leadership that saw this silliness 3 months ago. Yes, all developer-focused AI subscriptions have been cancelled, and only AI features tacked onto existing subscriptions are part of the AI strategy (eg: Jira+AI, Confluence+AI, Analytics suite du jour+AI, Microsoft Copilot Pro (SHUDDER), etc etc etc.) Yes, it is virtually impossible to get any additional spending approved. Yes, there is no more Claude, there is no more Codex, it is all gone now. The AI hype occurs only in company-wide emails about commitment to modernization (with AI), reorganization (with AI), and consolidation (with AI), where no actual strategy is proposed other than what the management consultants advise (with a caveat that there is no budget for anything other than AI features that are tacked onto existing subscriptions at no additional cost.)
  - alfiedotwtf 3mo ago
    @ihsw you’re currently greyed out so I can’t reply, but lol holy shit i’d be updating my resume if i were you
    - oblio 3mo ago

EmanuelB 3mo ago

https://github.com/dtnewman/burn-baby-burn https://github.com/dtnewman/burn-baby-burn Get ready for that promotion!

HiPhish 3mo ago
I love how the images are an AI-generated fever dream. Normally I hate those things, but in this case it's a perfect match for the AI clown world.
katzgrau 3mo ago
The real unlock is at line 149 of bin/burn

KronisLV 3mo ago

I'd unironically like my workplace to cover AI spend for me. There's so, so much mechanically simple but time consuming refactoring that should be done but nobody ever does that because there's never enough free time. Or even various utility scripts and at least finding out of date docs (or writing very basic ones where none exist, though it'd be hard to get them not to feel like slop writing). Or figuring out what additional custom linter rules would be useful, how to improve the CI pipelines and so on. If I had the Anthropic Max 20x subscription, I could make a large part of the technical backlog disappear (relatively safely).

swiftcoder 3mo ago
> If I had the Anthropic Max 20x subscription Most of the tasks you have listed you could do with Haiku, GPT mini, or DeepSeek Flash. An Anthropic Max 20x subscription is considerable overkill for this sort of task.
MaKey 3mo ago
I've had great success with OpenCode Go and DeepSeek v4 Flash for Terraform code refactorings and extensions. It's cheap enough to pay it yourself ($5 first month, $10 afterwards). Ideally you provide the model a feedback loop (e. g. passing tests) so it can safely iterate.
esseph 3mo ago
There will always be more work to do, especially for someone else's company. What's the rush? Friday will still come at the same speed, and it's unlikely you will receive an increase in pay to account for your increase in productivity.

rwmj 3mo ago

It's also the easiest way to determine if your management has AI psychosis or not, and make corresponding decisions about whether to stay with the company.

Forgeties79 3mo ago
No one is leaving their job because their manager is too obsessed with AI. Especially not in this economy/job market.

TheOtherHobbes 3mo ago

Parkinson's Law: Work expands to fill the time available. Updated version: Tokens expand to exceed the budget available. Fantasy: automated productivity Reality: automated bullshit makework and bureaucracy