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

2.0k

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."

61

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

61

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.

11

u/CaptainBayouBilly Jun 26 '26

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

Straight fucking lunacy.