We used to count lines of code, then we’re counting commits, then tasks closed. And now it’s tokens.
And if there’s a metric, there’s a way to inflate it. That’s how tokenmaxxing was born.
Tokenmaxxing is when a developer maximizes the number of tokens they burn in order to climb the leaderboard. The manager’s leaderboard. The company dashboard, where you light up as “AI activist of the month.” Whatever scoreboard someone decided to wire up to the API bill and mistake for productivity.
Programmers love a leaderboard. First, because it has sorting — and sorting is cool. Second, because it’s a simple, legible instrument, satisfying to grind up like XP in a game. Give an engineer a number that goes up and a column that ranks them against their peers, and you have built a slot machine. It doesn’t even matter much what the number measures. The number going up is the reward.
So the moment “tokens consumed” lands on a dashboard, someone, somewhere, starts feeding the model padding to win a contest nobody should be running.
So, two questions. Do you have tokenmaxxers at your company? And how deep is your company in the AI fever?