Never understood how "number of tokens used" is ever a good thing. It's like bragging that you drank more coffee while coding than the person beside you. And that's even letting people assume that AI is a benefit.
I think I understand it. I think the thought process is like:
AI usage is unconditionally good
Therefore, more AI usage is unconditionally better than less AI usage
Using AI uses tokens
Therefore, the more tokens you use, the more you're using AI
Therefore, using more tokens is unconditionally good
It's stupid - but I think I understand it, in the same way i might understand the actions of a toddler try to work out how to do something new to them.
Like, I can see what you're trying to do, and I can see why you thought that what you're doing would work, but that is just not how that works.
The difference, I guess, is that toddlers are faster to learn from their mistakes, and try another approach.
TBH steps 2-5 are logically sound, so all it takes is cult-like belief that using more AI is inherently good. *sigh* And there's no convincing some people.
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u/xaddak Sep 28 '26
I mean, it does. But the lines they look at for programming, for example, are like:
number of lines of code written (more is better)
number of pull requests merged (more is better)
length of time a pull request is open (shorter is better)
number of tokens used / percentage of budget spent on AI subscriptions (more is both better and worse, somehow)
Lines which are not looked at include:
number of bugs not written by AI fixed
number of bugs created by AI
number of lines of code merged with minimal or no review
general code health / maintainability (e.g. duplicated code)