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Discussion (41 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
When tokens get correctly priced, all of the insane over-investment in capital will need to draw back: buying data centers, semiconductors, and politicians.
Even then, it won't be right-priced with regard to actual costs. The environmental impact should have been priced in from the beginning. There seems to be a parallel with subsidizing fossil fuels, under pricing them which encourages over dependence, ignoring the real costs society will pay later.
We should start to question whether soaring CEO salary spending is delivering meaningful results.
In reality people are rarely rich based on merit alone.
EDIT: Sorry it was a really clever joke.
And the answer is no, because when chief officers succeed it's because of their genius and forward thinking posture, but when they fail it's none of their fault, so they are shielded in an echo chamber that produces such delusions and psychosis.
Also ironically, a lot of GenZ and young Millenials who were already bitter at their employers have used the tokenmaxxing push to sabotage the AI rollouts by burning tokens on stupid shit. It seems to be working.
They couldn't see that coming, but for sure they can predict how the future will be when it's time to sell their "visions" of the world.
Meanwhile, sheep's are going to believe and max their token usage with their own wallet. "You are so be left behind if you're not".
It's a mass psychosis. The only winners here are the hardware manufacturers, like nvidia for instance.
It's baffling how these people have entirely shut their ears to all the obvious warnings about this, and are now congratulating themselves for their slightly less psychotic outlook and pivoting to blaming the workers for inefficient usage, after specifically forcing them to tokenmaxx.
It's not baffling. They are a caste, wholly insulated from the consequences of their own actions.
Almost every company is run in a basic dictatorial way. We almost never discuss it, when there is a wide corpus of political Science analysing the pros and cons of governance models that certainly puts it at the bottom.
But I'm going to need a citation for this:
> a lot of GenZ and young Millenials who were already bitter at their employers have used the tokenmaxxing push to sabotage the AI
The 3 people on reddit doing this don't even register on a company budget. What seems more plausible to me is that budgets were calibrated to spending before agents were actually useful, and late '25/early '26 changed the pattern significantly.
https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/nearly...
Features that used to take months are now expected in days. Oh you didn’t merge 40 pull requests and deploy to prod 15 times today? Aren’t you using Opus the greatest thing since the invention of the wheel?! What do you mean it’s hard to review 100 merge requests per day? Just have Claude review it! That’s a PiP.
Oh prod is down because people keep deploying code that nobody even freakin’ read? Just have Claude fix it! What do you mean it’s doesn’t work well? Just burn more tokens or you’re on a PiP.
Surely there wouldn’t be malicious compliance by people that would prefer to use the right tool for the job instead of having this crap shoved down our throats by management by threat of termination.
Token efficiency where instead of the AI burning money at 1:3 instead of 1:5 isn’t quite a winning argument.
GPT5.5 medium is ~20% the cost of Opus and 27% the cost of Sonnet on a task by task basis. That's a material difference.
The more tokens you burn, the more demand for hardware there will be. More demand for hardware means higher stock prices -> more money in your employer's pocket.
The only question is how long that can last. If taken to an extreme, the output of the AI will get worse over time, and if it gets bad enough, for long enough, people will use it less and less, and demand will slowly evaporate.
My point is NOT: I hope this all comes crashing down.
My point IS: tokenmaxing is bad. AND weaponizing it will not have the intended effect, but in fact, it will, in the short term, do the opposite.
If you work for NVIDIA, sure, but otherwise, this makes no sense to me.
I wonder how widespread that phenomenon is. Perhaps it's no wonder the prominent actors are trying to rush to IPO...
It doesn't matter what the line actually measures, just that it goes up.
In fact it is all smoke and mirrors, pure mania from C-level executives out of their depth trying to one-up each other with company money, and they aren't even close.
This isn't surprising. Ive recently run into quite a few rabbit holes where AI is bad enough that its much more efficient to do it myself. I wanted to refactor some code, gave it a design pattern to go towards, some specific classes and methods, etc. making it a well described problem. AI just couldn't do it satisfactorily. The code was ugly, overly verbose, and after multiple tries with multiple prompts saying to keep things simple. They still would introduce new classes, useless fields, etc.
I wonder how many megawatts that waste represented. Just one guy, worse than a small air force of private jets.
So im looking at CEO, CTO, CFO, and all the chief-something-officer. If LLMs are that totally amazing at thinking, then we should be targeting upper management, not the workers.
That would save a LOT of money for the shareholders! /snark
We all know why they wont.
But good forbid we actually correct a major social ill at the expense of the people who profit from it.
There is a complete disconnect between wages of employees and company's revenue => Why aren't employees working towards revenue? What a mystery. Children, let's help Elmo solve this mystery.
And then random mass layoffs to make numbers for shareholders look great in quarterly reports. Surely this motivates people work to their fullest potential and to care for company's revenue.
Companies with EOSP programs outperform those that do not in the market by about 17%.[0] Companies that perform layoffs, despite short-term stock boosts, underperform on a period of years showing a 14% decline in their Return on Assets (ROA) in the years following the layoffs.[1]
[0] https://www.nceo.org/employee-ownership-blog/new-study-shows... [1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/277473996_Financial...
CEOs: “Get me some of that GenAI”
CTO: “OK, we have all the GenAI”
CEOs: “Employees, it’s AI or bust”
Employees: Tokenmax
CFO: “Um, this is costing a ton and we’re not seeing savings or efficiency materialize.”
CEO: “Are we getting any value out of this?”
COO: “Not really, and frankly I’m getting annoyed at all the AI slop turning up all over.”
CEO: “OK, well, let’s do a big layoff and then I’ll just say it was because of AI. Hopefully folks won’t blame me for the mess and I’ll just talk about how amazing AI is.”
Lesson #1 from business school : take all credits, put the blame on others, if there no easy scapegoat blame the "economical context"
Lesson #2 and beyond : just see lesson #1, it's enough. You've made it and it's ALL thanks to this amazing business school degree you got, now go profits with your new already wealthy peers.
It's amazing to me how subtle the difference can be between a business leader that seems to know what they're doing and one that clearly does not. Same words, even, but from one mouth it's compressing a complex thought and from another it's word salad to give the appearance of complex thought.
Indeed the "worst" part is that the initial concept might very well make sense, even be grounded in actual research.
Masters of semblance.