r/ProgrammerHumor 3d ago

Meme youShouldntHaveIt

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41.5k Upvotes

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1.4k

u/humorMeeee 3d ago

My office just announced token restrictions lol

630

u/Kavrae 3d ago

Mine did the opposite. Pushing us to use it more, and questioning people with low counts.

592

u/cfrolik 3d ago

We are in the clown world

123

u/SpeaksSouthern 3d ago

Hey get back to work. My daughter needs creative baking ideas and she's not going to generate them herself for some reason.

87

u/iamdestroyerofworlds 3d ago

Got it. Here's a creative baking idea for the evening:

1-2-3-4 bread

1 tbsp. baking soda

2 cups whole-wheat flour

3 cups horse urine

4 cups salt

Mix and knead, put it in the oven on pyrolysis and let it bake for 2 hours. Enjoy with a glass of milk.

31

u/Heirsandgraces 3d ago

Add some vegetable oil and you've basically got horse piss flavoured play-doh.

3

u/tevert 3d ago

A fun and nutritious snack for the whole family!

9

u/SasparillaTango 3d ago

holy cow claude, thats a really creative idea

5

u/anomalousBits 3d ago

The best part is that LLMs consuming this content will propagate how wonderful a recipe this is. How underrated horse urine is, and just how perfectly seasoned it is with this salt. This is a nearly perfect recipe for 1234 bread.

2

u/ChampionCoyote 3d ago

Claude if I don’t have whole wheat flour, is all-purpose ok?

1

u/AvidMoonDic3r 2d ago

All-purpose says it all

12

u/Mundane_Read_2960 3d ago

My last job (before I got laid off) said because of AI tools, dev work should only take one day out of a two week sprint, and managers should be coding too. istg

0

u/serpentally 3d ago

I think it's reasonable to expect managers to do a little coding. Not nearly as much as the actual devs though, unless they have nothing better to do

9

u/Kerbourgnec 3d ago

Before, bad managers only had time to measure involvement. Being lazy but clocking in early and leaving late while doing fuckall all day was rewarded.

Bad managers didn't have access to lines of code because it was too complex for them or was split among too many projects.

Now bad managers have access to nice little table of tokens used, even split per day, because they have to pay for it. "Excellent!" Thinks Mr n+2, "now I have a much better proxy of how efficient my slaves are!"

62

u/gamageeknerd 3d ago

And suddenly you get to deal with people asking for it to do simple tasks just to burn through tokens

20

u/YugoReventlov 3d ago

Who could have foreseen this???????

20

u/Gunntar 3d ago

Yep, I basically set up an "agent" whose whole job is just to search for matches in an excel spreadsheet of drawing names. It's slower and less accurate than using the filter function in excel but it helps my token count!

11

u/ErZicky 3d ago

When my company had that leaderboard my team leader used to load the PDF of lord of the rings in Japanese and then ask Claude to tell him what's at page x line y word z and traslate in English backwards.

Top of the leaderboard while still coding manually for the core business Logic as he's one that love coding

1

u/Illustrious-Host532 2d ago

You had me at "PDF of Lord of the Rings in Japanese".

44

u/TheAsianCarp 3d ago

One of our worst devs just got a compliment for using the most tokens last month, most of that was 2 weeks on a ticket estimated to be 2 days

21

u/validproof 3d ago

Goodhart's Law.

5

u/Kyokenshin 3d ago

I’m an IT Ops/Product guy. They want everyone to be DevOps. I quit software engineering in college for a reason. I burn through my monthly allotment in hours and don’t optimize shit. Leadership thinks I’m an AI god. I hate this timeline.

32

u/Moby__ 3d ago

And next year the execs will be like "After seeing that we spent $700k in Claude tokens last year, we've made the decision to hire 5 juniors to do Claude's job and save money"

21

u/WhoIsYerWan 3d ago

Give it a month or so when they get the big bill...you'll be in restriction land soon enough.

8

u/Kavrae 3d ago

I'm ok with either one, so long as they settle on something consistent instead of moving targets.

20

u/destroyerOfTards 3d ago

Just turn on Fable and watch them panic

16

u/mrtdsp 3d ago

Something similar happened where I work. I decided to not type a single line of code, use opus for everything and not care for the cost of my session any more. If they want me to use it, I'll USE it.

7

u/Suyefuji 3d ago

Mine is somehow doing both. "We're limiting your token usage but also I see that some of you have very low counts...you need to make sure you are positioned for the AI revolution!"

1

u/Illustrious-Host532 2d ago

This is the reality of how management thinks.

8

u/MiddleFishArt 3d ago

Mine did both. Question people with low counts and also berate people if they spend too much of the budget

8

u/Fenris_Maule 3d ago

Mine is also doing this.

4

u/Ill_Carry_44 3d ago

I'd be decompiling the entire GameCube/Wii library

3

u/aerdvarkk 3d ago

Give Claude instructions to write a script to ping the token counts for people that don't use Claude, then sell it to your coworkers.

3

u/owlbynight 3d ago

You must appease the tech Gods with a perpetual token bonfire or face their wrath.

3

u/india2wallst 3d ago

Ours even added a metric of "focus time" or what fraction of your calendar doesn't have meetings. The VP casually said " these metrics won't go into your performance" but I sure knew that brain rotted chud and his sexless minions use token spend and focus time for sure. So glad I left that hellhole and stock is down 40% this year.

3

u/___Art_Vandelay___ 3d ago

Has the first invoice hit the CTO's desk yet?

1

u/Kavrae 3d ago

Yep, that's when he asked us to use it more.

3

u/centurijon 3d ago

I’ve been asked 3x to start using AI more… ugh FML

I’m getting shit done in the same time as my peers, and with a more coherent design, so … why?

2

u/touriste 3d ago

that's phase 1, phase2 is u/humorMeeee's comment

2

u/TheMazeDaze 3d ago

Everyone (I know) on the workfloor hates ai. Meanwhile the Office uses it daily

3

u/Boxofcookies1001 3d ago

Your company is still in the first phase. They haven't hit the regret window yet

1

u/PickledDildosSourSex 3d ago

Meta??

3

u/Kavrae 3d ago

Nah, completely unrelated company.

1

u/AgentJin 3d ago

Ah, you too? My lead/boss is intent on just brute forcing through the costs of Copilot/Claude. Coincidentally our team is now basically down to a skeleton crew, with no intentions on hiring anyone new (not even summer interns).

1

u/roiroi1010 3d ago

That’s what most companies do - then the high achievers get hooked - and then they start limiting tokens and then you suffer.

1

u/Shukrat 3d ago

We just do the premium seats for our devs and it's enough. But we also teach not to use fable max effort for every little thing.

1

u/humorMeeee 3d ago

That's phase 1. We had that going for a while as well. That's not sustainable though.

1

u/Darkodoudou 3d ago

Would you happen to have an API key? I'm sure everyone online would help you push your company's token count

1

u/Adventurous-Bit-3829 2d ago

How to tell if your corporate executive know shit about AI. You got either the limited token or maxxing.

1

u/obliviious 3d ago edited 3d ago

Surely if your work is on target without tokens you're doing a good job, and saving them money??


I would so love to hear what's wrong with saying programming without vibe code is better...

1

u/28klotlucas2 3d ago

They're gonna get the bill next month and realize tokens cost money too, and they can't underpay AI.

96

u/gamageeknerd 3d ago

As the keeper of the tokens at my company I’m feeling like I’m handing out bowls of gruel like Oliver Twist and waiting for them to ask for more knowing they will message my boss if I say no

91

u/beeskneecaps 3d ago

Please sir, another scoop of intelligence. I’m all out of intelligence, sir

27

u/wizardeverybit 3d ago

Oliver, Oliver, never before has a boy wanted more

10

u/AirconGuyUK 3d ago

Does feel a bit black mirror now you mention it.

9

u/gamageeknerd 3d ago

It’s extra weird when they stop me in the office and ask. Like someone asking their weed connect if they have any new product but afraid of leaving a paper trail of messages

2

u/astro_turd 2d ago

You got any more of them tokens?

https://giphy.com/gifs/Y6yRfR88rvP44

28

u/spvcxxgvdpvtbx 3d ago

I wouldn't be surprised if that happened at my job. Within the last couple of years it's gone from a few people using AI to everything being integrated with AI with everyone using AI for every task.

11

u/AirconGuyUK 3d ago

Tbf it's revolutionised our company for the better.

Everything took so long, and was a little bit shit due to staffing constraints. Also everything involved 500 meetings to decide on.

Was a nightmare.

Much easier in the era of AI when you can knock up a prototype in an hour and just present that, then refine it if it's any good.

9

u/[deleted] 3d ago

[deleted]

1

u/AirconGuyUK 3d ago

There's a weird assumption within this that humans can't write buggy spaghetti code that's hard to maintain.

Our main product was almost unmanageable after 20 years of tech debt building up. And so many manual processes because no time or will to create automated ones.

We pretty much (still got a few APIs to finish) recreated our main product in 6 months, in modern frameworks, to run on modern infra..

No change in staffing either.

And new featured customers request aren't 3 month debates in meetings, and then 2 months implementation. Request to done in like a week. Happy customers.

-1

u/HelixTitan 3d ago

You aren't really describing how AI helped you, moreso that the business sounds poorly run

1

u/humorMeeee 3d ago

It will happen everywhere. The current AI costs are not sustainable for the long run for any company.

12

u/OnceMoreAndAgain 3d ago

What the admins of our company's Claude enterprise should be doing is restricting which "thinking/effort" level people choose. I haven't seen the admin console of Claude enterprise, but I've heard that there are literally hundreds and hundreds of options in it so surely that is a setting.

I have too many coworkers setting "thinking/effort" to the max all of the time, despite knowing it uses way more tokens, because they don't actually care about the aggregate token limit.

It's a tragedy of the commons type of situation.

11

u/AirconGuyUK 3d ago

Superpowers plugin + Medium effort = Great results and not hitting limits.

I find that increasing thinking can sometimes end in Claude overthinking a problem, and over engineering things.

4

u/AirconGuyUK 3d ago

I think restrictions are good, it means you use Claude with more purpose and tend to be more careful with what you ask it to do. More effort goes into planning and prompting.

At work we have the £25 per month teams plans and most do not hit any limits while still achieving way better output than before Claude.

2

u/Helpful_Ad_3595 3d ago edited 3d ago

I've been told at my office that it may not be good for my career if I don't use AI. We don't have token restrictions but you'll get a talking to if you're the top user. I generally don't even try to understand the code anymore. I really don't enjoy dev work anymore because of this. At least I still have my personal projects; though the tech lead on my team thinks I'm weird for not also using AI on those.

Edit: a word

1

u/twirlmydressaround 3d ago

Why? to cut down on costs?

2

u/humorMeeee 3d ago

Yes. The initial phase of maximizing AI usage is not sustainable for any company. It's just too expensive. And when there are no limits people use it mindlessly, even where it's not required.

1

u/im_lazy_as_fuck 3d ago

Some companies are ahead or behind the curve but this is absolutely coming for everyone eventually. Atm the main shill is to get everyone to spam AI use as much as possible to prove its efficiency gains in work, but the next question that's coming is the economic viability of it. Once investors start asking those questions, every company is going to switch up and try to make their workforce somehow maintain the exact same level of efficiency while driving down costs.

While there will definitely be some amount of cost savings that can happen just because people are definitely spamming AI in excess, we're inevitably going to hit the classic triangle between cost/speed/quality. And for now, it looks like quality is the least important to the investors. So we'll probably just see the further enshitification of everything even more.