> It's comical that managers are being so naïve as to think that you can crap out a dashboard of "tokens consumed per week" and get any useful signal at all from it, beyond learning who's not using AI.

If some guy decides to spend a bunch of money bringing AI tools into the company things might get very uncomfortable for him if they're seeing zero return on that investment. He's sure not going to get recognition and a massive bonus for it. If on the other hand, he can put some numbers in a spreadsheet or powerpoint showing that employees are using AI all the time and profits are up again this quarter, maybe he can take some credit for that or at least keep his boss or the company's shareholders from questioning the wisdom of dumping so much cash into those AI products.

  > things might get very uncomfortable for him if they're seeing zero return on that investment. 

  > If on the other hand, he can put some numbers in a spreadsheet or powerpoint showing that employees are using AI all the time and profits are up again this quarter

thats exactly what i see first-hand; no actual measure of dollars in vs dollars out, just x number of employees are generating y number of pr's with z% ai code + this quarter we made a profit = ai productivity boost...

total brainrot

> just x number of employees are generating y number of pr's with z% ai code + this quarter we made a profit = ai productivity boost...

TBH, if x,y, and z led to your company making an increase in profits over the quarter (im not saying it did, just that your recounting of it implies the connection was made), then it pretty much did its job. The last one is a more than meaningful metric for bosses, companies, and shareholders =)

The point is that kind of lazy accounting isn't really showing that the profit increase wouldn't have happened without AI. It may even be the case that profits would have been better without the cost and use of AI, or even that by generating a bunch of AI slop they're accumulating costly technical debt they'll eventually have to dig themselves out of.

We've already seen companies admitting that they aren't seeing a return on their investments in AI. We've also seen companies trying to convince us (or themselves) that ROI isn't important, and people should just stop worrying about it and that maybe in 5-10 years they'll start to reap some benefits. Some of the efforts people make to justify the costly investment they've made in AI can start looking a little desperate. All this token burning and tokenmaxxing might be another sign of that.

All those numbers are equally gameable and terrible metrics for productivity. With any of those, as with AI spending, you've got to look at actual results qualitatively. There's no shortcut.

The eternal evergreen lesson of managing software developers, and knowledge workers more generally.