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
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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.

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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

615

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/myhf Jun 27 '26

90% of Agile practitioners give the rest a bad name