this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2026
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Even if the whole idea of having employees use AI as much as possible wasn't stupid in and of itself tracking token usage is a terrible way to do it.
It's like trying to work out how much work has been done in a warehouse by tracking employees calories, sure the people who've burnt more calories have probably done more work but it's not one to one equivalency.
I can mess around with an AI for an hour using thousands of tokens up and produce nothing tangible at the end. If I'm going back and forth trying to get an AI to write a piece of code and that takes me an hour to get a result that I could have written myself in 15 minutes, then I'm not being productive. But I sure as hell used up a lot of tokens.
This exactly. Tech employees are metric hacking to look good to AI-obsessed bosses, who are too clueless to understand that maybe, just maybe, employees want promo more than they want AI to change the world and take their jobs.
This guy was almost certainly using a swarm of AI agents to make the token burn more efficient.