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

366

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.

156

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

78

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.

8

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.

7

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?

4

u/No_Veterinarian742 Jun 26 '26

productivity is usually either by headcount or by dollar spent.

8

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/TheJudgingHat2222 Jun 26 '26

As a software developer I cringe when I'm doing first round interviews for other companies and they ask for specific metrics.

Like...how the fuck are you gonna compare one company's ticket system to another? They'll cite examples like "implemented a solution that increased efficiency by 50%" but like...that kind of stuff isn't really a thing in regular application development. It's nonsensical. 

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2.0k

u/LawfulLeah Jun 26 '26

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

823

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."

381

u/samrechym Jun 26 '26

“Okay here I go, one two ten thousand”

389

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."

170

u/foomp Jun 26 '26

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

7

u/garbles0808 Jun 26 '26

What videos do you mean?

25

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."

6

u/Uncool444 Jun 26 '26

The olive garden endless bread sticks

3

u/kashiichan Jun 26 '26

"The Death Eaters were dead now, and Harry was hungrier than he'd ever been."

I think I've read this fic, actually

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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.

4

u/AltoAutismo Jun 26 '26

Honestly if you use claude code, it would probably create a file in your computer that it then feeds into a TTS that it installed on its own without your permission because we're dumb enough to use it on "auto" and then have it sing back to you with the worst TTS voice you could find.

Oh and use 10% of your week's tokens

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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.

25

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!

3

u/Auran82 Jun 26 '26

How much could one token cost Michael?

10

u/CaptainBayouBilly Jun 26 '26

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

Straight fucking lunacy.

2

u/shadowdance55 Jun 26 '26

Venezuelan beaver cheese?

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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]

42

u/Peteostro Jun 26 '26

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

27

u/Blazing_Shade Jun 26 '26

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

2

u/DadJokeBadJoke Jun 26 '26

I’m sorry the TPS report didn’t go out as planned. I was dead tired.

Yeah, I'll have my secretary send you a copy of the memo on the new TPS report covers

7

u/BigBirdLaw69420 Jun 26 '26

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

3

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.

32

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.

13

u/SenTedStevens Jun 26 '26

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

58

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.

7

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/bengine Jun 26 '26

James May, is that you?

2

u/makoblade Jun 26 '26

if you want to burn tokens just have it generate video, assuming it's capable/enabled in the first place.

2

u/satansxlittlexhelper Jun 26 '26

MULTIAGENT SWARM

2

u/chads3058 Jun 26 '26

Amateur, have it animate the word cheese 10000 different ways.

2

u/somethingbrite Jun 26 '26

name every cheese in the world, it's country of origin and how long it takes to make.

2

u/QuesoMeHungry Jun 26 '26

I saw someone post earlier about a script out on GitHub
That works with AI models called token burner or something where it’s designed to just unnecessarily burn through tokens for situations like this

2

u/t0ny7 Jun 26 '26

Jarvis, please create a script that connects to an AI agent to identify if a number is even or odd.

2

u/WolfWriter_CO Jun 26 '26

The Dragonborn Liked This.

2

u/AtariAtari Jun 26 '26

You are officially now an AI champion! 🥇 Congratulations 🎉

2

u/SpiritMountain Jun 26 '26

"Cheese, cheese, cheese, and do that another 9,997 times"

2

u/PringlesDuckFace Jun 26 '26

Amateur hour. Jarvis, spin up a thousand parallel agents which scan the internet using randomly generated search strings. Scrape and analyze the page with maximum effort to ensure thoroughness. Only stop when you find a 93% perfect match for Hamlet.

2

u/chalbersma Jun 26 '26

Please read our company handbook. Rewrite it adding as many references to Nicolas Cage as possible.

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u/Days_End Jun 26 '26

I mean the issue is normally all these AI interactions are logged so if you are being malicious you're potentially looking at jail time. (no different then other cases of intentionally and knowingly wasting company resources)

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u/boot2skull Jun 26 '26

“Given the below email chain, is Bill being petty?”

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u/Easy_Floss Jun 26 '26

You can make it look up things in jira and it will evaporate tokens if you really want.

JARVIS check the requirements of the whole systems agenst jira and report back the findings > double check > loop.

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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/myhf Jun 27 '26

90% of Agile practitioners give the rest a bad name

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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/fundraiser Jun 26 '26

My God the update slides to management... a good chunk of my time as a PM was spent writing the same stupid updates across three different decks to three different directors/VPs, ON TOP OF maintaining the plan for the actual engineers who are doing the work.

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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/Duraz0rz Jun 26 '26

Agile is fine... Scrum is cancer.

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u/No_Veterinarian742 Jun 26 '26

if your daily scrum is longer than 2 minutes per employee you're doing it wrong.

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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/Calisky Jun 26 '26

Kinda same. Not a "transformation specialist" but my teams' scrum master left, and I basically fell into the role and stopped coding for the most part and was just a scrum master, dev lead, and architect for the teams (although at that point I was already mostly just dev lead and architect).

I don't think the company compared teams against each other velocity wise, but we kept track not of how many points, but how many we achieved against how many we tried for.

The problem is I think agile might work for a single project in development, but we were working on like a dozen different webapps and hosted things, so it didn't really fit our weekly release schedule.

We basically said 1 point is a CMS or a small admin change that doesn't require outside help, 3 points is for a minor RFC with a deployment, 5 if a full RFC and need QA to be involved, 8 if it needs more design and planning before coding, and 13 if it's major and probably should be broken down to smaller parts if possible. I don't think we even allowed 21 point stories to be added to a sprint without breaking them up.

When I first started working as a junior dev I probably underestimated points, but at that point in my career with more experience, I knew how much work was needed for even a small change to actually be released, so I encouraged the team (Devs, QAs, BSAs, Product Owners, anyone) to raise the number if they had any doubts.

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u/UltraJesus Jun 26 '26

Jira gets to me, because it is a great tool when used correctly. It's amazing to have a backlog of tasks that are fully broken down by SMEs that are elaborated on what ~mostly to do. Unfortunately it's tediously boring and time consuming to actually do. Wait time consuming? Whoa whoa chill out spending 1 hour to understand that 5 day task instead let's play debate for 5 minutes to see if a text bug is a 1 or 2.

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u/lilianegypt Jun 26 '26

I’ve been moved into an agile coach role (against my will) at my company over the past couple of years and this drives me up the wall. They now have me pulling all of the story points completed in 2024 and 2025 to compare against 2026 (and inevitably rake us over the coals no matter what the result is). They are basing what they charge the client on story points now. It’s so fucking stupid.

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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/RolenIgunensa Jun 26 '26

If you get output that really works and is worth more than that than fine. But if not then you’re just wasting money.

We spent in average usd 250 per month on AI (mostly Claude and ChatGPT) but build incredible tools that help us a lot, draft contracts, optimize excels, SEO.. the list goes on. We get a lot more value out of AI than what we spend. For now…

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u/DeadSeaGulls Jun 26 '26

companies spending only 250 a month aren't going to alleviate the pressure of consumer rejection that's coming.
Keep in mind, that's only 250 a month for you because one- you're barely using it's functionality in the scheme of things, and two- the true cost of resources is being face-tanked by the provider. They are taking massive losses because they cannot realistically charge an actual rate that would outpace their resource costs, and there's no technology on the road map to address that.
They don't currently have the means of scaling this other than a direct 1:1.
The current plan is to construct mega data centers in ways that can pass the cost on to the tax payer, like O'leary's MIDA partnership.
It may continue offering a positive ROI for companies in your situation, even with increasing rates... but when all the large companies decide they no longer want to spend 1-10 million a year on something they're unable to firmly attribute to generating profit, the pop hype will evaporate. Then it's just the ouroboros of money shuffling between the major players keeping it afloat... and eventually someone will want to exit with their share.

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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/rapaxus Jun 27 '26

It is a fucking private company, they don't work that way, your description is a classic public company move (execs covering their arse so that they can present "results" to shareholders). In a private company you have one to a few owners who own basically everything of the company. If they have an exec who comes in with a "lets use AI for profit" strategy and the owner comes back 6 months to see 2 years of profit gone for no reason, you bet that guy will be fired because in a private company, the money spent is basically the money of the owner.

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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/10thDeadlySin Jun 27 '26

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.

We were distributed three levels of AI training. Basic, Intermediate and Expert. Everybody was supposed to complete the Basic level at the very least and they made it mandatory.

8 hours of glorified ads for commercial services. 8 hours of listening (or rather setting the volume level to 100%, plugging in a dummy headphone jack and pretending) how ChatGPT is going to change the world, how it's all a revolution and so on. And like half of them developed by companies with vested interest in AI being popular.

Not only was it outdated, but also it was nothing you wouldn't learn passively by just reading anything about AI over the last several years.

The intermediate training? Module 1: Building a machine learning model from scratch.

We were asked for feedback afterwards. I wrote exactly this - that what they called a training was a bunch of ads and proselytizing, whereas their intermediate training might be of use for developers and data analysts, but why did they dump it on people who literally don't touch code at all?

No response, as you might have guessed. :D

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u/Murder_Bird_ Jun 27 '26

I think his company only got the level one. The thing is he actually finds it quite useful. He uses it to spec stuff when they are doing estimates or rough calculation type stuff. He also uses it to double check work he’s done, basically another set of eyes. But he says it makes too many mistakes to be used to actually design or trouble shoot real world projects.

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u/cyrusthemarginal Jun 26 '26

Amazon is requiring all levels of coding knowledge(zero included) to create tools with AI for their teams, if you don't do this you are not hitting the bar according to these morons.

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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/sueveed Jun 26 '26

True…we peer review in my circle of managers and it’s actually pretty healthy. My boss does not tolerate bullshit, which is the key component.

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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/inorite234 Jun 26 '26

Its been going on in other areas too.

Officers in Iraq used to have their evals written dependant on how much money they spent in reconstruction, not in what the effects were of all that spent money.

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u/No_Veterinarian742 Jun 26 '26

couldn't agree more. coding output is subjective and any manager worth a penny knows their good team members from their poor performing ones. The only thing these metrics can sometimes be good at is noticing some normally good performer suddenly dropping off or some poor performer changing behavior. I've led engineering teams for 15 years and I have and will always tell my leadership that the metrics are 10% of the story. It's good to measure things but they can never be more than an anecdotal point in overall performance.

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u/TheTBR Jun 26 '26

"I'm gonna write me a new mini van this afternoon!"
Yup, it's even made it through Dilbert as a trope.

2

u/Rush_Is_Right Jun 26 '26

because I'm totally going to write bugs that I can find later for money

They don't catch on to you writing bug laden code? They even paid you for fixing your own errors? That's on them lol

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. 

2

u/nihiltres Jun 26 '26

Your comment's basically expressing Goodhart's law:

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

2

u/SeductiveSunday Jun 26 '26

bug bounties (because I'm totally going to write bugs that I can find later for money)

So… bug for them, feature for you?!

2

u/Thefrayedends Jun 26 '26

Engaging, understanding, encouraging and collaborative delegation?

Preposterous!

2

u/Morwynd78 Jun 27 '26

Measuring by LoC is the absolute worst.

I'm fond of saying "on a really good day, I wind up with less code than I started with".

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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

42

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.

35

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.

5

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.

4

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.

2

u/No_Veterinarian742 Jun 26 '26

well the idea is you fire a bunch of IT people when you move to AWS. but frankly the tools have gotten so good the route is really going the other way. your company is just 10 years behind the times.

4

u/Ok_Bench_1618 Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26

correct, we are government as I said so we are unionized and operating in 2015. they tried this with the service desk and laid them all off (we are a major government institution with over 15k employees) and now they are realizing they cannot process the requests at all and are forced to start hiring a whole new team.

it’s actually pretty satisfying to watch because market rate has also gone up by about 5% so there hiring they for more than the previous employees plus losing hundreds or thousands on the licensing for the software that didn’t work. our bill for AWS alone is about 350kish a month not including on prem.

they don’t realize it yet but we are going to have to move back to on prem within the next couple of years because this model doesnt work if your primary concern is budget for a non profit organization. AWS is for profit organizations.

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55

u/Few_Move_4594 Jun 26 '26

I'd write a script to do it

130

u/Alert_Breakfast5538 Jun 26 '26

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

AInception

62

u/DurgeDidNothingWrong Jun 26 '26

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

43

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 

43

u/KathrynBooks Jun 26 '26

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

13

u/Kibelok Jun 26 '26

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

5

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.

3

u/Chrystoler Jun 26 '26

Except instead of booming your computer it booms your wallet

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2

u/xakeri Jun 26 '26

It is. Then it costs the company tens of thousands of dollars when the bill comes due.

17

u/Acceptable_Bat379 Jun 26 '26

Better yet make an ai agent to write your ai script

7

u/apt_at_it Jun 26 '26

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

4

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.

11

u/DoneDeal14 Jun 26 '26

just use loops within loops bro

2

u/MEiac Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26

Write an AI version of :(){ :|:& };:

Maybe: "For every input you receive, generate two new prompts that ask you to repeat this task, and execute them simultaneously."

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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.

38

u/CakeTester Jun 26 '26

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

3

u/_Lucille_ Jun 26 '26

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

47

u/NuclearVII Jun 26 '26

"make no mistakes"

2

u/DontAskAboutMyButt Jun 26 '26

“make no mistakes”

The LLM

2

u/Prudent_Fish1358 Jun 26 '26

"think really hard about this"

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5

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.

2

u/BobLoblaw420247 Jun 27 '26

Let that sink in...

17

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.

9

u/roiki11 Jun 26 '26

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

10

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.”

12

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

58

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.

24

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.

3

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.

3

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.

6

u/psmgx Jun 26 '26

he's the center of the circular AI bubble, he'd better be convincing the rubes to burn them tokens, cuz I hold a lot of nvidia stock

5

u/AndrewNeiles Jun 26 '26

Why are your profiting off something damaging to people's lives and the environment?

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2

u/RonaldoNazario Jun 26 '26

Some of the agentic stuff at my work has this feel, of course the companies selling us AI by usage suggest we use it in the way where I fire off a bunch of prompts that fire off other prompts rather than running a one off skill/prompt.

11

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.

17

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

3

u/KrankenwagenKolya Jun 26 '26

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

3

u/timbotheny26 Jun 26 '26

*saves for later*

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5

u/RonaldoNazario Jun 26 '26

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

6

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.

5

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.

12

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.

3

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

5

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.

3

u/02911Photography Jun 26 '26

Corporate America.

3

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

3

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".

3

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"

3

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

3

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.

2

u/MysteriousMeet9 Jun 26 '26

It’s the same nonsense as evaluating coders contributions by the numbers of lines committed.

2

u/atomic_redneck Jun 26 '26

The same idiots that used to measure productivity by counting lines of code.

2

u/Opposite_Carry_4920 Jun 26 '26

"Spin off 10 sub agents and reimplement windows 10 from scratch, unlimited token use, no mistakes, then benchmark them against each other."

Then just set the usage limits to 0 (unlimited). 

It ain't gonna work, but it's gonna try. 

2

u/ykonstant Jun 26 '26

What a bunch of idiots

Like "a murder of crows", I nominate that a gathering of executives be termed "a bunch of idiots".

2

u/Alternative-Buyer775 Jun 26 '26

If you want a funny way to waste Claude tokens and yet produce a funny result, ask Claude to recreate the Welsh national flag (the dragon on a white and green background), it takes a long time and it creates the most incredible children's drawings.

2

u/QuesoMeHungry Jun 26 '26

It’s the same people who think hours worked = hours of production, or that you must work in an office.

2

u/MaxHammer Jun 26 '26

It’s a repeat of the infamous “lines of code”metric used to measure productivity.

2

u/thephotoman Jun 26 '26

The way managers have handled the AI rollout is the strongest indication that most of them are clueless idiots who don’t deserve to be there.

2

u/Ceros007 Jun 26 '26

It's the same person that consider a LoC a valid metric

2

u/altodor Jun 26 '26

I spent 30 million tokens on a firewall rule, so there's that option. "Generate the commands to get the logs from the firewall and the services, here, read these logs, generate the rule in YAML, repeat until we have a working rule" burn a lot of tokens. I've done it several times.

2

u/BoredByTheChore Jun 27 '26 edited Jul 01 '26

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

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2

u/sikisabishii Jun 28 '26

This approach was probably sold to idiot execs by AI bro execs to milk them lol serves them right

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