alt Hacker NewsYeah I see the same thing at work. Most of the people burning crazy numbers of tokens aren't doing any amazing work. They're just using fable to write their emails and do their web searches.
They feel like they're super smart but it's just as smart as hiring a $500k/yr PhD as a PA to schedule your meetings and answer the phone. Sure it does a good job but you're just wasting money and abilities.
They feel super edgy and bleeding edge but all they really do differently is switching the AI chat from auto to the most expensive option all the time. When I see what they're using it for they're only grasping the basics of its abilities.
They're also people sending 2 page AI generated emails that make no sense for literally everything where a "Yeah sure let's do that" would have sufficed.
Unfortunately most of these are business leaders who just want to look edgy and "all in on AI" so we can't really limit their tokens. Yet they're also the ones saying we spend too much and want to limit some of our dev teams actually putting it to good use.
I tokenmaxxed in my last role.
Management succumbed to AI psychosis, and so we were directed to show that we were adopting and using AI, but what we were using it for was not considered important. So we went out of our way to burn as many tokens as possible.
If you tell Claude to be inefficient and burn as many tokens as it can, it’ll happily oblige. It will also offer useful advice as to how to use even more tokens.