Engineering

If an engineer at Big Tech can simply be fired, managers get hurt differently. They get converted into an IC — an Individual Contributor. On paper it’s a kind of tech lead: someone who both writes code and helps others write it. Except they code… so-so. The industry moved on without them During their years away from the keyboard, the industry changed so much that even the tools and the terms they used to rely on are gone. The ground they once stood on has been repaved twice. ...

Continuing the tokenmaxxing theme. Google says 75% of its code is written with AI. Meta says 90%. Uber burned a whole year’s worth of tokens in the first four months of the year. Programmers tokenmaxx. Managers token-flex — about how much their team spends on tokens per month, as if the API invoice were a performance review. Everything’s better with AI Need a status report? AI bot. Monitoring? AI bot. Code review? AI bot. Dashboard? AI bot. Every action a programmer takes, every automation, every cron job that used to be twelve lines of bash — must now go through an AI. Because everything’s better with AI. Obviously. ...

The internet borrowed the -maxxing suffix from the looksmaxxing crowd and bolted it onto everything. Sleepmaxxing, dopaminemaxxing, and now tokenmaxxing. So when people hear the word, they assume it means the obvious thing: pour the maximum number of tokens into the model. Dump the whole repository into the context window. Paste the entire PDF. Buy the million-token tier and use every last one of it. That is not tokenmaxxing. That is just spending money. The real thing is sneakier. ...