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Comments (129)

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  aurareturn
  Tokenmaxxing was just a way to force employees to start leveraging AI in a meaningful way.For companies that have measured performance based on token spend, they can now dial it back. Employees have learned to leverage AI for things they wouldn’t have prior. Now they know what’s possible and what’s not.No one is stupid enough to always measure performance based on token spend and have unlimited budget. It was always a temporary thing to transition the employees to a new world.Management felt like employees weren't leveraging AI fast enough. That's why in 2025, there were many mainstream articles about how CEOs were forcing their employees to use AI or get fired. Tokenmaxxing was just the other extreme. Companies will arrive at an equilibrium.There's no need to overthink this.Edit: One reply cited this X post as an example of why management needed to do this. Trying to change a company with hundreds/thousands/tens of thousands of employees is hard. You have to send one simple message at a time. https://x.com/danluu/status/1487228574608211969?lang=en
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  et1337
  Folks have been saying “things are different now, the agents are now compounding success instead of error” for at least a year now, but I just don’t see it. I was lucky enough to receive a weeklong $50k per head AI training from the people saying these things, and one of their few helpful concrete recommendations was to constantly clear context all the time, to avoid things going off the rails.However, I think finding security vulnerabilities is one use case where it doesn’t matter. Tokenmaxxing is absolutely effective for that. We as an industry are in the middle of adopting very expensive, complex continuous fuzzers.
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  ambicapter
  > That’s no longer true. We’ve entered a different regime, where spending more tokens generally results in better results. We call this “compounding correctness” — the more tokens you spend on getting a task correct, the more likely you’ll get a good outcome. We talked about this a bit at the last in person Agentics meetup:Have we? Is it generally the case that the more tokens you spend, you better results you get? This take is so weird I suspect author somehow financially benefits from tokenmaxxing.
• red_admiral
  > Like, imagine if some serious business leader, like, idk, Mark Zuckerberg, decided to announce that Meta was going to burn money.Like ... pivoting to the "metaverse" and changing the company name to show he's serious.
• natyoung
  Studies have proved that you'd have been better off with fartmaxxing.
• dofm
  This is like hell, if hell was being stuck on a really poorly-maintained uncomfortable rollercoaster forever.
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  jtrn
  Better title more in line with the content of the article would have been: The reports of tokenmaxxing’s death are greatly exaggerated.Pet peeve of mine is nonsensical usage of the x is dead, long live x.
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  theanonymousone
  What is meant by a "loop" here? Just repeating the same prompt until you get the desired result? Are subsequent repetitions too close to each other?
• kaizenite
  This seems to happen with most big tech adoption in the first few years. The big data boom in the early 2010's had execs just buying up spark clusters and data lakes before they even had a clear analytical use case or governance.
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  linsomniac
  >I’ve basically never heard a business leader say that they were going to set a bunch of money on fire because it made them feel good.Really? ~4 years ago our CEO hired a consultant to fly out several times to do team building exercises. We can't afford to do our 3-year server refresh cycle, but the consultant was no problem to pay.We just recently had branding consultants come in and also spent thousands of dollars (AWS charges) on rebranding all our photos. We operate in a captive market, if you want to operate in our market you are required to subscribe to our service, and if you aren't in our market you can't subscribe. Branding at the end of the day drives 0 sales.Heck, reminds me of the time a company I was working with hired a new CTO and one of the first things he did was as "server renaming scheme" using obscure (to the US-centric staff) city names from around the world (database servers are Swiss city names, web servers are Denmark, storage is Finland). We went from cattle naming to pet naming, for a CTO that lasted ~6 months.In my experience company leadership is not quite as thrifty as this article likes to think they are.
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  fraywing
  Brute forcing positive outcomes by spending more tokens until a happy path manifests does not solve the underlying comprehension (and liability) problem.I fear a world where critical software is stood up with increasingly non-human governed abstraction because it [seems like it] works.Software engineers as the review terminal in a conveyor of business-led code mass production... coming to a company near you?
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  mvkel
  At least it's being used. There are many examples of tech over-adoption, like building out capacity for 1M concurrent users, only to see 50.
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  EGreg
  I don’t think people who write these headlines understand that “long live the king” used to refer to the next king. Where is the next tokenmaxxing?
• IceHegel
  Funny, now it's the management saying "Go be a bohemian, experiment, spend freely." and the employee saying, "Hold on, where's my ROI?"
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  behnamoh
  Tokenmaxxing was never a thing to begin with. Just because a few companies did it doesn't mean it was a widespread phenomenon.
• gausswho
  It's AI usage mandates now, but rather than focusing on how the current hot topic has ripped through the business world, often without benefit nor repercussions at leadership, I'd prefer to analyze the higher pattern. We've recently experienced such ripples as the metaverse, blockchain/nft/web3, 'the cloud' (and a minor wave of cloud gaming). There was even a teacup buzz of 'apis', oddly disconnected from the semantic web.Why do such fever dreams occur at all? Are they getting more prevalent? More damaging? Do they jepaordize the global economy? Should they be regulated in some fashion?I can't prove my case, but I think it's a symptom of media manipulation/consolidation, the 'fiduciary duty' delusion, and that shareholders can hold the puppet strings tighter than they used to. More and more, they place their sillytown bets and expect the plebs to dance to them.
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  impish9208
  “Thing is dead, long live thing” is dead, long live “thing is dead, long live thing.”
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  j45
  Beyond getting momentum going for a cmpany, Tokenmaxxing is lighting money on fire.The idea of tokenmaxxing reaches different companies in different waves, so it will be discovered in waves and outgrown in waves in companies and industries in their own cycle.In the long run, tokenmaxxing is like drunken sailor spending. Scaling is almost always about a large component of efficiency, and lighting money on fire in the street can only last so long.
• gmziven
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