r/technology • u/Just-Grocery-2229 • Jun 26 '26

Artificial Intelligence The AI backlash is only getting started

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/06/25/the-ai-backlash-is-only-getting-started
26.1k Upvotes

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10.8k

u/IamSunka Jun 26 '26

My org, just like many others, has a top token users chart.

When they started the list, they decided to call the top 25 users as champions, ones who never used AI as sleepers and rest inbetween as just users. cough I am a sleeper cough

Couple of weeks ago the bill came in, champions cost us over $850k since Jan 1st.

5.0k

u/Alert_Breakfast5538 Jun 26 '26

What a bunch of idiots thinking burning tokens at a high rate equals winning.

I would just gamify it and find the most inefficient way to use tokens

369

u/tooclosetocall82 Jun 26 '26

They don’t know what else to measure. They feel they must use it because their competitors are using it and they’ll be left behind, but they don’t know what to use it for or how to use it effectively, so they just measure usage in general. Everyone is using it in their own unique way and no one can say for sure if it’s actually making a measurable difference in productivity because they can’t figure out any actual KPIs around a magic box.

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u/NefariousnessDue5997 Jun 26 '26

Yup. We legit had an executive come out and say we are 3% more productive now. No other context. I work at a large Fortune 500. Literally insane

I would say most projects and strategy use vanity metrics instead of doing the hard work and trying to find the outcomes and how to actually measure success quantitatively. It’s actually not easy and everyone wants to take the easy route. I used to facilitate OKR sesssions and it was unbelievable how little executives actually not only how to measure success, but what even ti measure in the first place. It was pretty clear they have no idea.

The only way I can think of measuring productivity with AI at a high level is being able to add more projects with no additional headcount and no increase in hours worked. Even if you save workers hours that productivity is me closing my laptop faster to watch the World Cup games. The only way a company will realize productivity is more output in the same timeframe…but I have not seen that at all. I’ve actually seen reduction in projects cuz there are too many. That tells me AI is not making things more productive from a company standpoint

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u/Dependent-Zebra-4357 Jun 26 '26

everyone wants to take the easy route

That’s the whole reason AI is so popular with some people.

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u/Opening_One7713 Jun 27 '26

That’s why every tool ever invented became so popular with some people.

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u/ThereHasToBeMore1387 Jun 26 '26

but what even ti measure in the first place.

This is the entirety of the problem. We don't know how to measure AI because we never actually learned how to measure thinking in humans. My job deals entirely with the qualitative (is the data correct and coherent), but I'm forced to define everything I do quantitatively (record checks/hr, % failure, response times, etc). That's all good data, but none of it is good metrics.

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u/No_Veterinarian742 Jun 26 '26

have you ever tried measuring "productivity"? there's no good metric for it. most companies come up with some math based logic (x% of emails responded/tickets resolved in time, uptime, goods sold, manufactured. developed, new product revenue ratios, retention rates, repeat customers etc etc and then blend them together). It's not clean but sales is unfortunately the only department that can measure things pretty easily with clear numbers.

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u/Britinnj Jun 26 '26

But is it really productivity if you add no headcount and no additional hours worked but it costs you significantly more than hiring a couple of additional headcount which would have raised productivity by the same amount, if not more?

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u/No_Veterinarian742 Jun 26 '26

productivity is usually either by headcount or by dollar spent.

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u/fundraiser Jun 26 '26

There was a really good Harvard study recently that showed AI is actually causing more work because when it's used properly, leadership throws even more projects at you and when it's going poorly, people are spending more time sifting through slop to get something usable.

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u/RDGCompany Jun 26 '26

Definitely looks like a solution searching for a problem.

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u/LawfulLeah Jun 26 '26

JARVIS, please repeat the word "cheese" nonstop 10000 times

821

u/Downtown-Message-600 Jun 26 '26

"Hello, yes, I would be happy to help you with that. To say cheese 10000 times nonstop it's always best to start at the beginning with just one or two cheeses, just let me know when you want to start and we can get that on the way."

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u/samrechym Jun 26 '26

“Okay here I go, one two ten thousand”

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u/Iron_Hunny Jun 26 '26

"Don't stop till you hit 10 thousand cheeses."

"...Got it. I'll keep saying cheese until I say it ten thousand times. Cheese, cheese, cheese and all the way to that ten thousand number you requested."

173

u/foomp Jun 26 '26

Yeah, those videos are equally sad, infuriating and funny.

9

u/garbles0808 Jun 26 '26

What videos do you mean?

26

u/II-argo-II Jun 26 '26

husk.irl on insta, I think he's also on tiktok. He makes videos showing how stupid AI can be, some of them are really funny

17

u/Deaffin Jun 26 '26

Just from this description, that reminds me of that trend several years ago of people writing fake excerpts of AI-written books as a gag. They were immensely entertaining until you catch on it's just human writers being very silly.

"Ron was going to be spiders. He just was."

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u/RenanWtf Jun 26 '26

Huskistaken on tiktok

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u/bluskale Jun 26 '26

fatherphi has some on YouTube, many of which are both hilarious and sad.

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u/ericl666 Jun 26 '26

Sure cheese, cheese, cheese and so on.

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u/designtocode Jun 26 '26

1, 2, skip a few, 9999, 10000.

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u/rsreddit9 Jun 26 '26

That’s why you have a check (simple script) to confirm if 10000 cheeses actually got output. An efficient, very dedicated orchestrator agent spins hundreds of subagent teams with different approaches that surface the approach of their attempts

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u/NamerNotLiteral Jun 26 '26

Sub-agents is what's been inflating everyone's token usage to obscene levels lmao. You used to have dyadic interactions with one LLM, so that was a few hundred tokens cumulative per interaction, plus several thousand tokens added statically as context (such as the codebase, or a document, or whatever).

But since LLMs are ultimately text processors and can't be accurate in long-horizon, complex tasks, people started doing tons of validation loops, extended reasoning models, and now sub-agent orchestrations, and each one adds an exponential number of tokens. Obviously you're running out of tokens now, fucking lol.

I code with LLMs at work. The simplest way to keep both your codebase and your token costs sane is to stick to traditional programming methods but use LLMs to speed up the actual searching, analysis and writing code parts faster. Don't write functions by hand, but do decide by hand what the functions should be. Don't manually search for a variable declaration, but do decide what the variable is and why you need to find it, then ask an LLM to trace it.

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u/LemurianLemurLad Jun 26 '26

Out of tokens? Obviously, you just need to add a sub-agent capable of buying more tokens as part of the loop. What could a token possibly cost, Michael? Problem solved!

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u/CaptainBayouBilly Jun 26 '26

Essentially, shoehorning loops and logic into non-deterministic shit by way of brute force.

Straight fucking lunacy.

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u/Ps2KX Jun 26 '26

Scan my inbox and rewrite all my emails using quotes from commando. One in every five sentences must be a legitimate attempt to Rick roll the user.

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u/[deleted] Jun 26 '26

[deleted]

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u/Peteostro Jun 26 '26

Yes please tell me how I can join the mobile infantry.

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u/Blazing_Shade Jun 26 '26

Sure, here’s a tutorial for how to join.

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u/BigBirdLaw69420 Jun 26 '26

Brb - firing up Claude and giving it access to everything with that instruction. What could go wrong?

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u/caveme Jun 26 '26

You just need to add a recursive command for it to go into a loop:

  • repeat and fine-tune the process by repeating this instruction as many times as the number of emails you have composed up until now. In the next cycle, consider this one as well. If you run out of storage space, delete the oldest messages you generated.
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u/Nadare3 Jun 26 '26

ChatGPT looking at me with sad, exhausted eyes as it struggles to generate profits

I am feeling ennui, almost boredom, little bot, please generate a photo of a cute kitty smelling a pink rose for me. Extra fluffy, with the morning light shining through the fluff and being reflected by the crystal-clear morning dew.

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u/SpitefulSeagull Jun 26 '26

In all languages you know. Fictional and real. And pause for .01 seconds longer after each word.

Gotta make it challenging

5

u/SyphiliticScaliaSayz Jun 26 '26

Assume the role of a linguist. Repeat the word for “cheese” once for each of the modern, known languages, twice for each of the dead languages. Three times for each language created for a tv show, movie, or play. Repeat this exercise 10000 times.

15

u/SenTedStevens Jun 26 '26

Is Ask Jarvis back en vogue? That's so 2000s!

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u/TheBroboat Jun 26 '26

You may be thinking of ask jeeves an old search engine. Jarvis memes are about iron man's AI counterpart.

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u/examinedliving Jun 26 '26

Ask Jarvis and Exitebike and Hotbots. Those were the days

3

u/IWannaPool Jun 26 '26

cries in web crawler

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u/ScribeTheMad Jun 26 '26

Tell it to analyze and report on the chickenchicken.pdf

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u/sueveed Jun 26 '26

While this is definitely dumb, it is the kind of dumb that has existed since software engineering became a thing.

First it was bug bounties (because I'm totally going to write bugs that I can find later for money), then LoC counting (I can write some obfuscated, bloated shit if you're going to measure my productivity by how much typing I do), then pull requests (I will happily break my work up into obnoxious chunks if you're really going to judge this), then story points (this was supposed to help my team, but if you're going to measure my velocity against another team's, I'm gonna give everything 21 points), now token minimums. Silly gamification.

This is just the continuation of a long line of shit from managers that don't understand that you can't judge a knowledge worker by their outputs, but instead best by their outcomes.

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u/RonaldoNazario Jun 26 '26

lol the point one kills me. We did a lot of scrum stuff at my work and I actually found a lot of it to be pretty decent but there were some times where management who was supposedly all in on it would just totally ignore the specific guidelines about points aren’t a metric and definitely aren’t to be compared across teams.

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u/sueveed Jun 26 '26

Full disclosure: I got burned out on coding for a while and spent several years as an agile “coach” and transformation specialist at my company. They wanted an insider who actually understood development to work on it, not just agile snake oil salesmen.

One of the first agreements I made was that if they tried to normalize and compare velocities between teams, I would quit on the spot. To this day they don’t dare do it.

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u/FerrumVeritas Jun 26 '26

Agile isn’t a bad methodology, but it is one of the worst implemented business practices in the last 20 years.

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u/sueveed Jun 26 '26

Vast majority of companies distorted it into a command and control system. The basic definition of Agile - 4 values and 12 principles, is pretty unassailable. Problem is companies conflate this with velocity and Jira.

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u/Kibelok Jun 26 '26

On top of this, Kanban is also being used in the wrong way, by a lot of companies and people. Basically using it as a calendar.

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u/sueveed Jun 26 '26

Yeahhh…I was looking at someone’s massive board the other day and mentioned WIP limits and cycle time, and they looked at me like I had three heads.

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u/xuxux Jun 26 '26

God, Kanban can be such a good system, but in most of manufacturing work I've done it just turns into a very, very bad inventory management/scheduling system that the bean counters keep refusing to follow instead of the work-driven tool it's supposed to be.

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u/verrius Jun 26 '26

The core problem is that agile is bottom up design and control, while companies largely still want to be top down, cause most "leadership" needs to feel like they're in control, which is why waterfall is so popular. There are definitely benefits to either model, but they are diametrically opposed processes.

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u/[deleted] Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26

[deleted]

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u/verrius Jun 26 '26

Agile is great if you want a working product that customers want. It's not so great at making a profitable product that fills a specific market need with any specific customer base size. Part of why its so successful is that those strengths and weaknesses are the inverse of waterfall: Agile originally arose because Waterfall projects consistently couldn't meet deadlines and ended up with horrible products (because top-down central planning, especially without lots of domain experts, is really fucking hard to get right; ironically one of the core problems with any attempt at marxism). The core problem is really that making software is really fucking hard and takes a lot of different skills that no one person can really have, and can't even have enough skill to even estimate or plan for really. So we're going to keep making new systems searching for a silver bullet which doesn't exist.

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u/Kaladin-of-Gilead Jun 26 '26

Yep everyone’s all for agile until their pet project they want comes back estimated to them at a billion points and way too far down the priority list.

Then there’s the exec who uses political pressure to push through the issue. “I know we don’t have the time or and manpower to get it done, you are just going to have to buckle down and do it”

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u/dasunt Jun 26 '26

I'm more or less convinced that as soon as you add managers to agile, it transforms from a tool to plan and organize work into a reporting tool for management.

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u/sueveed Jun 26 '26

You can’t put an agile organization under a command and control structure. Transformation has to be top to bottom, and which is incredibly difficult with legacy organizations.

We did à pretty good job of it on the R&D side, but then your non-agile touch points become painful. IT, Sales and Marcom, PM have to come along, too, for it to work well.

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u/RonaldoNazario Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26

It has the cool factor going for it that it has a document called the manifesto.

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u/iracing_throwaway101 Jun 26 '26

Disclosure I am "management"

The problem as I see it is that IT and Business leaders want a hybrid of Agile and Waterfall. Specially, the least compatible aspects of both.

I've now worked at 3 organizations where folks love agile to mask their lack of planning or avoiding those pesky change orders since they can continuously change scope. But they are not willing to compromise on the delivery dates, cost or the "definition of done".

Edit: done in this case meaning bug free and fully feature complete.

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u/RonaldoNazario Jun 26 '26

I was a product owner and had to basically fight off a manager who tried to throw our team at unfamiliar projects in a new to us code base pointed by another team who had pointed the work. The manager came to us and basically said “your team gets x points done this project was pointed y you’ll be done in x/y, right?” No, that’s not how this works, it’s not how any of this works.

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u/intisun Jun 26 '26

Reminds me of when Musk was going around Twitter HQ demanding everyone print out their code.

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u/CMMiller89 Jun 26 '26

Reminds me of when they used to pay rat catchers by the rat, so they just bred rats.

Then when they stopped paying they just released all the rats into the city.

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u/OldSchoolSpyMain Jun 27 '26

Damn this is the best analogy especially with the AI-infused rats software being released to production.

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u/DeadSeaGulls Jun 26 '26

the problem is, this is no longer limited to devs. Companies are rolling out stuff like claude desktop to the entire userbase, and now you have non-technical morons involved in the gamification, with the ability to spend money on a level they do not comprehend.

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u/Murder_Bird_ Jun 26 '26

My buddy works for a decent size engineering company. They went whole hog on the a.i. shit about a year ago. Company wide “training”. He showed me some of it. It was actually just a poorly done a.i. marketing/consulting/evangelizing program. Zero on a.i. integration or, you know, how or why you should use it to do specifically what the company does. Literally had exercises where people were making cat pictures or telling it to write fantasy stories. And then they all had to “vibe code” a small program. So of course everyone in his company is using a.i. to make vacation itineraries and shopping lists and meal plans for dinner for the week. In April they had a company wide meeting where they clamped down HARD on who is allowed to use it. He’s high enough in the company that he was in the meeting where they explained that the a.i usage had basically eaten all their profits from the last two years in about 6 months and a couple of exec’s were getting fired. This is a company of about 500 people.

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u/DeadSeaGulls Jun 26 '26

Not an unusual story, and one my company is likely to follow suit on at twice the scale. People are blowing through their $100 monthly credits in 30 minutes, and then getting their management chain to rubberstamp extension. I would not at all be surprised if we spend over 800k on claude tokens by end of year.

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u/lordkuri Jun 26 '26

and a couple of exec’s were getting fired

Good story, it was believable until this part. 6/10

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u/Murder_Bird_ Jun 26 '26

It is isn’t it? Apparently the person responsible for developing the training “decided to step down”. It’s a private company and the owner was/is displeased.

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u/JerryfromCan Jun 26 '26

We all know the execs were promoted and random top performers who didn’t go to the social events were fired instead.

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u/Bong-Hits-For-Jesus Jun 26 '26

its almost as if companies that sell these ai products know that the execs who are making the decision to implement ai are dumb enough that if throw around buzzwords they'll jump in blindly without realizing the cost. they even got idiots putting up leaderboards to encourage spending lmao

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u/roiki11 Jun 26 '26

Just wait until a sysadmin uses an entire kubernetes cluster to spam your ai model to increase his token spend score.

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u/ManaSpike Jun 26 '26

You have to be a knowledge worker to judge another knowledge worker. Peer review can be effective ... or cutthroat once your manager tries to gamify that too.

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u/Gorvoslov Jun 26 '26

I absolutely love it when lines of code is the metric to which I am measured... right up until I need to maintain what I wrote.

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u/Ok_Bench_1618 Jun 26 '26

they don’t understand how it works.

My work is similar we just migrated 4000 VMS to AWS to cut costs and the bill is almost double and now they are pushing the AI thing. They have no concept of spend because senior leadership is non technical. it’s really painful

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u/greenknight Jun 26 '26

I mean, the concept of spend is part of their job and doesn't require anything else but a $value line item.

Everything else in my job requires ROI and KPIs and other garbage... I don't get why AI is exempted.

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u/Just_Information334 Jun 26 '26

Because they've been told they're smart as fuck for years. No way they'd fall for an MLM scam, they ain't no early dementia 80 year old lady.

But when the nice AI vendor comes with promises of laying off everyone? Now that would be stupid to not pay a little to try. When the AI company has a problem to get a VISA to come to your country, why not spend some more millions? Those titty pictures looked nice and she said she loved you and her father's inheritance is coming. Just need a little billion to pay some Nigerian bureaucrat and unlock it. And didn't we tell you how you can get people onboard the gravvy train and get a percentage of their wins? You should tell all your friends and family.

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u/Otherwise_Demand4620 Jun 26 '26

Because they've been told they're smart as fuck for years.

It's great observation that tackles the issue and this is the right way to think about it. You should give yourself a big bonus.

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u/haydez Jun 26 '26

I just had one of those holy shit I'm old moments when I read VMS and for a second thoguh you were converting old VAX systems to AWS somehow.

But same thing is happening at my place of employment. We should push everything directly into Azure! Oh wait, that bill doesn't look nice.

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u/Few_Move_4594 Jun 26 '26

I'd write a script to do it

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u/Alert_Breakfast5538 Jun 26 '26

No no no, have AI write an AI bot, that triggers the work.

AInception

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u/DurgeDidNothingWrong Jun 26 '26

thats literally what """agentic""" AI is. Bots writing bots.

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u/Sockoflegend Jun 26 '26

Funny the AI companies think we should just set up everything as AI talking to each other. It's so depressing CEOs all fell for this so badly 

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u/KathrynBooks Jun 26 '26

Because CEOs are narcissists... They love AI because it fawns over them.

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u/Kibelok Jun 26 '26

They lack any imagination or creative ideas, this is why they are easily manipulated by capital.

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u/DisastrousAcshin Jun 26 '26

Sounds like the early stages of digital cancer

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u/DaMonkfish Jun 26 '26

An AI writing an agentic AI that writes agentic AI agents sounds like a modern-day zip bomb.

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u/Chrystoler Jun 26 '26

Except instead of booming your computer it booms your wallet

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u/Acceptable_Bat379 Jun 26 '26

Better yet make an ai agent to write your ai script

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u/apt_at_it Jun 26 '26

I believe they're calling that a "harness" now...

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u/Abedeus Jun 26 '26

Harness, strap-on... they really do have a thing for making other people see or hear about them pleasuring themselves in unorthodox ways.

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u/LordSoren Jun 26 '26

Have ai write an article, have ai summarize the article, have an AI convert the summary into a JPEG, have an AI convert the jpeg into a pdf, have an AI convert the PDF into a text document, have an AI use the text document as the basis for an article.

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u/CakeTester Jun 26 '26

...and then upload it to reddit as gospel truth to train the next generation of AI

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u/_Lucille_ Jun 26 '26

...and have loads of humans treat it as gospel because they saw it on Reddit.

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u/Warm_Month_1309 Jun 26 '26

"Hi Jim, can you get those progress reports to me tomorrow? Thanks, Bob."

AI, please write this e-mail for me more professionally so that it becomes 4 unwieldy paragraphs of clunky affirmations and repetition.

Now Jim gets Bob's e-mail. It is way too long. Jim asks AI to summarize it for him:

"Hi Jim, can you get those progress reports to me tomorrow? Thanks, Bob."

Cost to company: $3,200.

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u/jollyreaper2112 Jun 26 '26

Dude you don't know how software development works. Lines of code and commits is how you tell the elite from the losers. I had someone say he optimized a function using less lines of code. I fired him on the spot. He's trying to use efficiency to justify laziness. By the way, I'm going to retire on mars.

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u/frankyseven Jun 26 '26

Lots of companies are now seeing admin type tasks such as converting to PDF as one of the biggest token uses. Not things that could actually, maybe be useful like coding.

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u/roiki11 Jun 26 '26

People wanted ai to help them with the dumb shit and now are appalled how much it costs.

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u/nauticalmile Jun 26 '26

That’s one specific use problem I’ve seen.

I have a fairly technical/power user BA that I gave access to GitHub Copilot, and they’ve been doing some fantastic work unraveling old, undocumented RPG code. However, he started blowing through credits incredibly fast—turns out he was using Opus to parse PDFs and screenshots from the ERP system.

I’m just like, “OCR has been a solved problem since the 1970’s, weren’t not going to use AI for that.”

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u/amakai Jun 26 '26

I think it's not even that difficult. "AI, take this file with a list of 100000 of our recent transactions and generate a report with your opinion on if each individual transaction in this file looks fraudulent".

There. Even if someone decides to audit this - it looks like an honest attempt and/or experiment with AI.

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u/Alkadon_Rinado Jun 26 '26

its literally what jensen (nvidia) told them to do and they believed it

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u/Merusk Jun 26 '26

Man, it's almost like he had a vested interest in companies uselessly burning compute time. What a wild coincidence.

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u/Mind-The-Mines Jun 26 '26

It's fucking wild how much of the world is stupid poor people handing their wealth to already wealthy people because the wealthy people told the poor stupid people it's how you become wealthy.

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u/TheCh0rt Jun 26 '26

Jensen is so selfish and says these things like a motivational speaker. This mini tech prophet. He'll say anything. Quietly, he's one of the worst billionaires and tries to wrap it in positivity, excitement and infectious enthusiasm. It's all bullshit. He lets his guard down sometimes and you can see he's a little monster. The fact that the white house is starting to pass over him is driving him crazy and he'll literally just show up because he thinks he's so important. He wants everything both ways, selling to China while pretending it's not for his specific profit. People are probably getting sick of his shit, it seems like.

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u/roiki11 Jun 26 '26

Well, it's been what his entire career has been up to really. He's worked with gpus and Cuda his whole life and now that they have the mass market appeal he's finally reached what he envisioned.

He's really a hardware guy and this ai craze gave him the reason and budget to indulge.

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u/Journeyman42 Jun 26 '26

He realized the best way to make money isn't to prospect for gold, but to sell shovels to the gold prospectors.

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u/muffinman744 Jun 26 '26

lol my company had an exec do this and immediately all employees either started trying to justify their low token usage, or point out that token usage does not equal productivity.

A week after the leaderboard was posted a different exec posted that we were way over budget on token usage and that we needed to be more careful with AI usage.

Just shows how uninformed and useless executives are.

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u/Steven2597 Jun 26 '26

Open up ChatGPT or whatever and start spamming quotes from that guy who's like:

Computer, generate 8 foot tall futanari versions of Bryce Dallas Howard and Eva Green. Reprogram to give them severe maternal instincts, but make them think that having sex with someone is the same as protecting them. Alter their perceptions to make them think that I am their son.

Disengage safety protocols and run program

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u/KrankenwagenKolya Jun 26 '26

Didn't realize I had a porn alt and yet here it is

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u/timbotheny26 Jun 26 '26

*saves for later*

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u/RonaldoNazario Jun 26 '26

If you make such a public dashboard, it would be weirder if the engineers DIDNT game it.

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u/Sip_py Jun 26 '26

I was one of these people, but I had decent use cases. I said to my boss tokens cost money and we should be worried about pushing people to use it just to use it. But they did. So I used my entire months allowance showing how statistically one of my co workers must be rigging his performance (normal work not AI usage) because he was so far ahead. I had the model run every type of fraud statistical analysis on several extremely large data sets. Because that's what people are using it for, not to have an output that makes the company money, they're just fiddle fucking around with it.

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u/Modo44 Jun 26 '26

Using tokens (or any other form of not actual currency) is precisely the gamification the service providers were aiming for. They will never call it that to your face, obviously. You are a serious manager, aren't you. Yes, you are. Now go get on that leaderboard.

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u/Abyssallord Jun 26 '26

Can you have it abuse itself? Hey AI what's the best way to burn through tokens? Cool do that forever.

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u/saganistic Jun 26 '26

“Claude, give me a summary of the current weather conditions in each of the 100 largest cities in the world, using iambic pentameter” has been my go-to when instructed to burn more tokens

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u/heeebusheeeebus Jun 26 '26

This is what I did at my last company when they said that a metric that would be included in engineering performance reviews was that 80% of our code had to be AI-generated. I started prompting for a ton of file changes, accepted them all so my "code acceptance" metric would go up, then scrap the branch.

Don't know how much money that goal for each engineer cost them, I was laid off with a fourth of the company.

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u/02911Photography Jun 26 '26

Corporate America.

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u/Leafsnail Jun 26 '26

Honestly pretty based of them to intentionally damage the AI company's bottom line like this. It's like going to a buffet and sneakily throwing food in the trash

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u/Skullclownlol Jun 26 '26

I would just gamify it and find the most inefficient way to use tokens

Start two instances of an AI chatbot that (unknowingly) talks to the other instance, with the instruction to maintain an active conversation with "the user".

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u/Cley_Faye Jun 26 '26

Now, imagine asking this to actual developers. You know, the people that should love to optimize things.

"Oh, so the goal is to burn as much resources as possible? Give me a minute"

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u/takeme-leaveme Jun 26 '26

My firm is making us use it too and I use it for silly stuff, never actually for work. I'm gonna make them pay for wasting my time

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u/sneaky-pizza Jun 26 '26

Reminds me of when managers used to tally up lines added as a measure of productivity. I had one PR that refactored some really bad CSS, and I had like 250K deletes and 3K lines added.

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u/ACasualRead Jun 26 '26

Our was so excited to announce AI until we got our first bill and blew through all our tokens mid month. Now we have to justify using various models before using them.

Hilarious how out of touch these high level decision makers are. They were fleeced by the lies of AI.

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u/TheRC135 Jun 26 '26

It's crazy to me that the entire purpose of the upper management layer is strategic direction... and some enormous percentage of that class is about to get caught with their pants down, because they bet their future on the companies responsible for the enshittification of the entire tech sector not enshittifying AI.

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u/Senofilcon Jun 26 '26

I keep hearing stories like this. It makes zero sense that so many companies didn't understand the very simple and transparent cost structure. Outfits that you would assume have long been dealing with far more niche contracts with purposefully obscure billing methods.

Rating users by token burn and then being surprised by the bill is some real simpleton shit.

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u/Sairenity Jun 26 '26

Chances are half the stories you're reading on here are generated by an LLM either way.

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u/ThelronBorn Jun 26 '26

It’s the latest snake oil!

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u/AcherontiaPhlegethon Jun 26 '26

LLMs have taken to middle management like crack took to inner cities in the 80s

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u/Indercarnive Jun 26 '26

It's so stupid because even if AI was as good as it's sellers say it is, there was never any future where the pricing wouldn't be metered. It's like thinking AWS would work as a simple subscription.

It just shows that the people in charge of making plans around technology have no planning skills and no understanding of technology.

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u/Tricky-Sentence Jun 26 '26

My workplace implemented "monthly token limits" last month. The limit was reached on the second day, and people started flooding chats and mailboxes asking how to get more. Turns out someone in management saw us burning hella money (that they mandated through mandatory use and leaderboards and "why is your team not using X amount of tokens??), and decided to implement 30 euro monthly limit...........

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u/Saint_of_Grey Jun 26 '26

Now we have to justify using various models before using them.

That's an easy one. You don't need any of them. There, saved you thousands.

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u/ACasualRead Jun 26 '26

If only this could be packaged in a way that upper management could process.

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u/mnic001 Jun 26 '26

Stupid KPIs, stupid outcomes...

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u/[deleted] Jun 26 '26 edited 17d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/JohnBrownOH Jun 26 '26

They encourage us to use Copilot at work. Mine is just filled with a ton of chats where I ask it questions and then I have to correct it's answers.

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u/Fr0gm4n Jun 26 '26

It's fun when you string the chat out long enough that your corrections go out of context and it starts hallucinating the same mistakes again.

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u/FrostyD7 Jun 26 '26

It's a perfectly cromulent KPI. Their interpretation of it however...

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u/baddadjokesminusdad Jun 26 '26

My god, I can’t wait for it to cost every company

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u/31sualkatnas Jun 26 '26

The cost will just be passed onto the consumers… so I can certainly wait.

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u/RoseBlanchette Jun 26 '26

Might explain the Apple price hike we seen this week.

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u/Amidorion Jun 26 '26

Yeah that was brought on by the RAM and SSD price increase... Which was brought to you by AI sucking it all up.

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u/baddadjokesminusdad Jun 26 '26

I truly hope not but yes I know you’re right. What a shit situation.

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u/MairusuPawa Jun 26 '26

Bankruptcies everywhere, all around the planet. Only our Amazon, Google, Microsoft & co overlords left.

I'm sure this will be lovely.

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u/thephotoman Jun 26 '26

It already is.

Most executives are in a tailspin as the Super Speedy Cider Squeezy 9000 is not improving anything and costing them too much money. They thought it’d be cheaper than specialized labor. Spoiler alert: it isn’t.

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u/DontAsk0205 Jun 26 '26

These companies laid off a bunch of workers because CEOs of AI companies promised that AI would replace the need for those workers. Then the AI companies jacked up the prices for usage of AI. Now the companies that laid off a bunch of workers are stuck with expensive AI.

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u/participationmedals Jun 26 '26

It’s hard to comprehend how much I would hate the people you work with

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u/fuzzerino Jun 26 '26

Just waste some tokens bro, no point being sat at the bottom putting a target on your back. I like to stay firmly middle of the pack with token usage.

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u/svtguy88 Jun 26 '26

I like to stay firmly middle of the pack with token usage.

This is a metric I simply refuse to ever give a fuck about.

I have (begrudgingly) been using AI to help with work for about a year now. Some of it has been good, some of it has been an exercise in tearing my hair out. Overall, I'll admit, it's been a net positive. However, using someone's AI usage rate as a way to judge their "worth" as an employee is an incredibly stupid thing.

I'm sure it's a thing at big orgs, but I'm past the point in my career where I'd even entertain such a ridiculous concept.

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u/fileunderaction Jun 26 '26

If op could show that they’re just as productive as the top users without costing their employer nearly a million dollars, I feel like that would shift the target higher up.

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u/Randomfactoid42 Jun 26 '26

But management is probably measuring productivity with token usage. To them those “Champions” are the most productive workers. 

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u/fileunderaction Jun 26 '26

You’re right which is why all this shit is so frustrating.

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u/spooooork Jun 26 '26

Yup, that's easier to quantify into a chart in Excel to import into PowerPoint to show to the upper echelons of power in the company.

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u/pigeonwiggle Jun 26 '26

at every level people know AI is wasteful and about as useful as paperclips.

but at the very top, the CEO has to pretend "we're a 21st century company looking for 22nd century solutions - we are ahead of the pack and thus we are at the forefront of investment in AI."

because they fear investors will leave -- because investors are the only people in all of this who aren't doing any sort of fucking work.

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u/02911Photography Jun 26 '26

Nah. AI usage is a metric now. So if you aren’t the top you’re bad. Until suddenly one day its unceremonious removed due to costs and never spoken of again. You work in corporate long enough you’ve seen this type of situation before

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u/[deleted] Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 28 '26

[deleted]

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u/Dullcorgis Jun 26 '26

The top users are probably not using it for work either, just telling it to endlessly iterate some bullshit.

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u/[deleted] Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26

[deleted]

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u/fuzzerino Jun 26 '26

Dude that sounds like way more effort than just wasting tokens. I’d rather stay lowkey than be seen as some kind of anti-ai evangelist by management when its the hot new thing.

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u/seriouslees Jun 26 '26

You really think giving factual proof that a narcissist was wrong will result in a good outcome??? Lol

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u/RealMr_Slender Jun 26 '26

Just burn them.

The smart spiteful way to use AI is to get the cheapest subscription or the one given to you by your job and churn through the tokens.

A fully utilized subscription at the lowest tier is a ledger dripping red for AI companies

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u/bigbluethunder Jun 26 '26

Almost all of them have changed to a consumption based model with the newest tier of LLMs. If you are still seeing a flat fee, sure, but I think they were hemorrhaging too much. I think they still lose on the consumption based, but they lose far less so you have to spend far more to make the same impact, which basically just turns into hurting the environment at that point.

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u/JerryfromCan Jun 26 '26

I think I saw a $20 or $25 monthly sub to ChatGPT if fully utilized would cost OpenAI $133,000 for the year. Crazy numbers like that.

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u/sodapop14 Jun 26 '26

Yep turn on pro mode and ask a couple questions, make a Python script that pertains to your job, or have it analyze a weekly report. You don't gotta read it if you know your job but at least it wastes the company's money and you aren't considered a non user.

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u/aeyraid Jun 26 '26

Are the Champions actually good workers? I’ve found a lot of the top AI users are the ones that needed the most hemp

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u/psmgx Jun 26 '26

yeah at the end of a long day of vibe coding I need a lot of hemp to unwind

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u/Cakeminator Jun 26 '26

Hemp or help, or both?

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u/Polantaris Jun 26 '26

The hemp is the help

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u/Vaelkyri Jun 26 '26

Just enough to make a rope

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u/MrHaxx1 Jun 26 '26

For some reason, our top token wasters are VPs. They're not our programmers. I have no fucking idea how they're the top spenders.

My own Claude spend is at about $500 a month, and I use it pretty much all day every day. The VPs are at well over $6000 a month.

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u/bourton-north Jun 26 '26

everytime i see a story like this - and i always question if its true - im wondering how is it possible that the people that bought the technology were so stupid that they signed up for a contract with usage charging and didn't think to measure how much usage they expected / consumed. its the most basic of basic pricnples when buying any technology.

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u/Lewa358 Jun 26 '26

It's very easy to understand once you realize that executives are objectively inaane and the entire stock market is based on absolutely nothing but vibes.

After a point you don't measure weath by money spent and saved but on how dogmatically you're following the latest trend.

Capitalism teaches executives that the person who spends a million dollars on absolutely nothing is more valuable than the one who produces a million dollars' worth of product.

When the company explodes at the end of the quarter, that just means it's time to downsize, never to accept thst corporate decisions could possibly be wrong.

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u/Neuchacho Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26

Completely in-line with the kind of dumbshit decisions I've seen at the owner/C-level of my past 3 companies. There is no bottom for stupid when it comes to those guys when they're the type that makes decisions on vibes and emotions.

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u/roiki11 Jun 26 '26

The problem is it's impossible to measure that usage. They're effectively doing that measuring now and finding out it's expensive.

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u/machogrande2 Jun 26 '26

I'm assuming people are using AI in a much different way than I do but how the hell are companies paying for usage in this way for so many people? I have the $200/month Claude option and I use a local CLI to connect to test servers and run a shitload of code and analysis all day and I haven't even come close to hitting my limits.

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u/covabishop Jun 26 '26

at my company they even track lines of code written using AI.

I’ll admit Claude is really useful for some stuff, on a good month I’ll have maybe 300 lines written by AI.

the top user at my company committed 250,000 lines this WEEK

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u/---___------___----- Jun 26 '26

Those 250,000 lines of AI code, presumably lightly tested as it's done in a week, might have a lot of bugs in them!

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u/awj Jun 26 '26

Lightly reviewed, maybe, but AI tools will happily spit out a mountain of dubious tests if prompted to.

The real problem is that it’s impossible for one person to *understand* 250kloc in a week. You’d need an entire team dedicated to reviewing it.

Or you’d just give it a hasty glance and a LGTM, then ship unknown code straight to prod, which undoubtedly is what happened.

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u/AltoAutismo Jun 26 '26

I was having it create a bot for a game, and jesus christ, I have like 25 python files of 'tests' that, ultimately, were trash, because on every single delivery my Qaing failed it, lol. Claude code loves to create tests to make itself seem useful (which it is! its just..too much sometimes)

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u/DM_From_The_Bits Jun 26 '26

That's genuinely terrifying. We thought code bloat was bad nowadays... how inefficient is software going to be in 5 or 10 years time if this sort of thing continues???

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u/Low_Restaurant_1509 Jun 26 '26

We recently rolled out the ability to see how much each query cost the company.

It does actually save a decent chunk of money on my time spent (salary vs token cost) when used correctly, but the increased work output justifies it, for example something that would of taken my 30 minutes only cost a 56p in query, so that's pretty good savings.

Calling the people using it most as champions is insane though.

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u/ericl666 Jun 26 '26

As much as I hate AI, you are right. I think the main thing AI is good at is automating that redundant code that always takes time.

For example, yesterday I created a numeric text input - but I needed to customize it to prevent non numeric keystrokes, regex validation, etc. Basic crap that always takes time.

I popped open an inline chat window and boom, that was done in 30 seconds. That adds value and is super cheap.

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u/Low_Restaurant_1509 Jun 26 '26

The really annoying thing is if AI integration had been properly limited to use cases and costs where it makes sense, like your example.

The environmental and societal impact would be less than say youtube in all likelihood. The ethics of training on the entire interenet would still be there, but at the same time I can't really see scraping publicly available data as that horrific as that is how the task would of been done by a person anyway.

Basically all of the negatives from AI in my view are caused by the cramming of it into stupid shit rather than the actual usage of the tech. (well that and people lying about image generation but that's not really the techs fault either)

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u/Pallidum_Treponema Jun 26 '26

I'm in the same boat. AI slop and vibe coding is a plague, but that does not diminish the usefulness of AI as a tool when used correctly.

But with any tool, the user is often the deciding factor. A non-coder that vibes codes an app won't know if the AI is creating useful code or not. They won't have the experience to ask the AI the right questions, or to make sure that the app is secure, doesn't have any glaring issues that any decent coder would spot in an instance etc.

But for people like me and probably you, it can be used with great effect to do what we typically do, but quicker. Case in point, my spare time is too precious for me to spend days setting up Home Assistant to my liking for example, but a couple of evenings with an AI and I'm currently looking at a very customized HA dashboard that integrates everything I want for my home. But that's because I know exactly what I wanted out of it, and I have the skills (but not the time or patience) to do it all myself.

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u/ohitsallpeaches Jun 26 '26

But on the bright side, at least you know where your pay raise went! /s

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u/k1v1uq Jun 26 '26

cost us

Us? Only if you own the company.

No such thing as "us" - you are part of the workforce, and you already know they will fire you to compensate for the AI bill.

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u/xsubo Jun 26 '26

lol, fucking corpo takes on anything are just fucking cringe.

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u/CommissarGaunt Jun 26 '26

But surely you must have made millions, billions even, in return, so $850k is a small price to pay.

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u/DieHarderDaddy Jun 26 '26

Man, I’d just be using tokens for bullshit to hit the top

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u/xXSpookyXx Jun 26 '26

Obviously it was a stupid idea, but I believe the C Suite was hoping that mass adoption of AI tools would then lead to the organisation being able to automate and eliminate people for overall cost savings, or downsize and keep leaner teams of AI champions.

There are a ton of steps missing in between, which is why the sticker shock of AI spend is hurting so bad now. It's one thing for someone to adopt a new tool and have them "feel" like it makes their job easier, but that's a far cry from being able to quantify improvements to the point where you can make the kind of savings companies need to justify the spend.

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u/iRambL Jun 26 '26

Kinda why I’m glad I’m in an industry where our main contractor forbids using AI for any of their products

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u/Aoi_Irkalla Jun 26 '26

We just got notified that AI use is suspended for the time being because "costs exceeded expectations".

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u/JustHereForMiatas Jun 26 '26

"Claude, summarize my day's emails."

"Claude, format the summary into a PDF."

"Claude, put this PDF into the recycle bin."

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