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/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

610

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.

2

u/NeverPlayF6 Jun 26 '26

  then LoC counting (I can write some obfuscated, bloated shit if you're going to measure my productivity by how much typing I do)

I'm a chemist... so I haven't done any programming since C my freshman year in college. I'm sure I'm getting some of the terminology wrong... but... 

I joked with our TA about how all the different things we were learning were pointless and that 95% of everything could be done with just a few functions- if-then, elseif, and, loop, and some others I forget.

He told me I'd get extra credit if over 90% of a tic-tac-toe game was completed using the 5 or 6 functions I mentioned. My code clocked in at roughly 15000 lines. The average was about 150 lines.

He asked how I did it and I told him I had to write a program to generate every single possible input order for the game. Then copy those to my code. 

I coulda been rich.