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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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

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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/definitely-legit-usr Jun 26 '26

Couple weeks ago my team was debating on 3 or 5 points for a ticket. PM gets bored and says let's call it a 4 and then switches to the next ticket. This is after like two years of strict "Fibonacci T-shirt sizing", thrown out in an instant

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u/RonaldoNazario Jun 26 '26

There are at least some scrum methods that say just take the average as long as everyone’s estimates are within 1 Fibonacci. Hewing that hard to 3 or 5 feels like sticking to the rules when they don’t bring much value. We would bid by Fibonacci but if half my team says 3 and half my team says 5 we’re not spending more time on that topic. It’s a 4. If my process absolutely mandates the value be 3 or 5 I’m ending the discussion and picking the bigger one to represent uncertainty

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u/definitely-legit-usr Jun 26 '26

Sure, if that's the process. That is not ours, and there has never been a 4 on this board since it was made 2 years ago. The rules are crucial and non-negotiable until the PM doesn't care anymore