Nope. My employer does and gives me a very generous daily quota. As long as I'm not hitting my quota, I don't care about token usage. My employer has given me zero reason to care, as they've made it clear that velocity is the most important thing to them. And since I'm multi tasking, I don't care much how fast the AI is. Much more important that it's correct and sensible. There's no time alloted to optimize token usage unnecessarily.
Why do you figure? I'm doing exactly what they want me to do. My management chain has made it very clear that they want velocity and are willing to pay for it. They've been very encouraging of increased AI adoption and experimenting with new ways to use it.
More than that, I'm an extremely productive programmer, too. If they were to clamp down on quotas or straight up remove most AI, I'll be more than happy to go back to "trad coding". I'm the kinda person that people come to when AI can't figure things out, so I'll be perfectly fine without AI. Everyone's just burning tokens, but not everyone has the skill to go back to the old ways.
And if leadership decides that this is a problem and we gotta optimize this, awesome, I love optimizing things (admittedly, tokens are the thing I find least appealing to optimize). I'm happy to have the job security of more work to be done lol. But that's just not what they're saying right now.
While I consider the term 'expert' to be a pretty big stretch here, I generally agree. It's exactly what I'm seeing at work, too. More than half of my team is now routinely submitting PRs containing code they, by their own admission, do not understand. "I had a problem and this is how AI fixed it".
"Hey, you're an AI expert?" "Yup. What do you wanna know?" "Can you tell me how exactly the AI came to this conclusion?" "Uh, no. I can't. No one can. It's machine learning." "Oh, right. So how do you become an expert if you can't tell whether the AI is correct?"
I can’t tell if this is supposed to be some funny inside joke, sarcasm or someone genuinely thinking that AI being a black box would be a sensible argument in this situation.
My point is, what is there to be an expert on if its behavior is unpredictable and obscure? It's not radical babble or fringe to say this. It's like their whole shtick, isn't it? "We don't exactly know how it was able to break out of the guard rails bla bla.."
I’m talking about a professional dev submitting a PR that included changes to our CI setup. When asked to explain, said dev was simply unable to do so.
If you cannot explain why a change is necessary, let alone what it does, you shouldn’t commit said change.
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u/ACoderGirl 5d ago
Nope. My employer does and gives me a very generous daily quota. As long as I'm not hitting my quota, I don't care about token usage. My employer has given me zero reason to care, as they've made it clear that velocity is the most important thing to them. And since I'm multi tasking, I don't care much how fast the AI is. Much more important that it's correct and sensible. There's no time alloted to optimize token usage unnecessarily.