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The Dumbest New Trend in Coding Productivity Setting Money on Fire

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Source: Internet of Bugs
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  • description: "Tokenmaxxing" is the latest corporate trend taking over the tech world, but is it actually measuring developer productivity—or is it just burning a monumental hole in company finances? In this episode of Internet of Bugs, Carl breaks down the origins of tokenmaxxing, from Jensen Huang’s podcast comments to prestigious VC letters pushing AI-driven developer metrics. We explore the terrible history of trying to measure programmer productivity (like counting lines of code), how Goodhart's law ruins these systems, and why massive tech companies might actually be incentivizing this slop just to train their own internal AI models. Furthermore, we look at the financial reality of the AI bubble, upcoming tech IPOs, and why shipping dead code or hiding bugs behind feature flags can cause catastrophic real-world losses (like the 2012 Knight Capital Group meltdown). 💡 SUPPORT THE CHANNEL ON PATREON: Join our Friday Patreon Q&A Zoom calls to talk about upcoming videos, tech trends, and industry superstitions sooner! 👉 https://www.patreon.com/InternetOfBugs 00:00 What is "Tokenmaxxing"? 00:55 Where the Trend Started (Nvidia & VCs) 02:03 The Nightmare of Corporate Token Leaderboards 02:24 How Do We Actually Measure Good Code? 03:52 Lines of Code, Story Points, and Failed Metrics 05:01 Goodhart's Law & Gaming the System 05:39 Why Big Tech Wants You Burning Tokens 06:49 The Superstitions of Software Engineering (LeetCode & Agile) 07:55 The Danger of Dead Code & The $440M Bug 09:17 The Real Solution 10:47 The AI Bubble's "Groundhog Day" IPO Forecast #Tokenmaxxing #SoftwareEngineering #AIBubble #DeveloperProductivity #TechTrends #Programming #TechIndustry #InternetOfBugs // Sources // Origins https://the-decoder.com/nvidia-ceo-jensen-huang-says-hed-be-deeply-alarmed-if-a-500k-developer-spent-less-than-250k-on-ai-tokens/https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/2025/12/nvidia-ai-financing-deals/685197/ https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/20/technology/tokenmaxxing-ai-agents.html https://a16z.com/there-are-only-two-paths-left-for-software/ https://finance.yahoo.com/news/a16z-unleashes-20-billion-ai-141615040.html https://www.notboring.co/p/a16z-the-power-brokers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreessen_Horowitz // What companies are doing https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtificialInteligence/comments/1sfjjj8/metas_internal_leaderboard_ranks_employees_by_ai/ https://fortune.com/2026/04/09/meta-killed-employee-ai-token-dashboard/ https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvglyklz49jo https://www.firstround.com/ai/shopify https://gaiinsights.com/blog/the-ceo-of-shopify-has-a-great-memo-to-employees-about-ai https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/shopify-admin/productivity-tools/shopify-magic https://www.forrester.com/blogs/what-you-can-learn-from-shopifys-ceos-memo-on-workforce-ai/ https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-tracks-ai-use-engineers-internal-friction-2026-4 https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-learning/improve-employee-productivity-using-generative-ai-with-amazon-bedrock/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-learning/streamline-employee-training-with-an-intelligent-chatbot-powered-by-amazon-q-business/ // Programming History Mentioned https://maseconomics.com/goodharts-law-economics-why-targeting-a-measure-destroys-its-value/ https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/362929.362947 https://junit.org/ https://www.henricodolfing.ch/en/case-study-4-the-440-million-software-error-at-knight-capital/ https://blog.statsig.com/how-to-lose-half-a-billion-dollars-with-bad-feature-flags-ccebb26adeec // AI limitations https://epoch.ai/blog/will-we-run-out-of-data-limits-of-llm-scaling-based-on-human-generated-data // Tokenmaxxing backlash https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/ai-cost-crisis-hits-tech-giants-as-employee-tokenmaxxing-backfires-agentic-ai-eats-up-to-1000x-more-tokens-than-standard-ai-sparks-corporate-pullback-at-microsoft-meta-and-amazon https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48268871 https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-coo-andrew-macdonald-ai-token-spending-harder-justify-2026-5 // Financial irregularities (just the most recent tip of the massive iceberg) https://www.wheresyoured.at/anthropics-profitability-swindle/ https://www.thestreet.com/latest-news/new-nasdaq-rules-open-door-for-spacex-other-tech-giants-to-join-passive-index-funds-immediately-after-ipo https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/spacex-ipo-filing-reveals-anthropic-set-to-pay-musks-firm-125bn-a-month-to-rent-xai-data-center-space/ https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/20/anthropic-will-pay-xai-1-25-billion-per-month-for-compute/
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