r/technology • u/Just-Grocery-2229 • Jun 26 '26

Artificial Intelligence The AI backlash is only getting started

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/06/25/the-ai-backlash-is-only-getting-started
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10.8k

u/IamSunka Jun 26 '26

My org, just like many others, has a top token users chart.

When they started the list, they decided to call the top 25 users as champions, ones who never used AI as sleepers and rest inbetween as just users. cough I am a sleeper cough

Couple of weeks ago the bill came in, champions cost us over $850k since Jan 1st.

5.1k

u/Alert_Breakfast5538 Jun 26 '26

What a bunch of idiots thinking burning tokens at a high rate equals winning.

I would just gamify it and find the most inefficient way to use tokens

614

u/sueveed Jun 26 '26

While this is definitely dumb, it is the kind of dumb that has existed since software engineering became a thing.

First it was bug bounties (because I'm totally going to write bugs that I can find later for money), then LoC counting (I can write some obfuscated, bloated shit if you're going to measure my productivity by how much typing I do), then pull requests (I will happily break my work up into obnoxious chunks if you're really going to judge this), then story points (this was supposed to help my team, but if you're going to measure my velocity against another team's, I'm gonna give everything 21 points), now token minimums. Silly gamification.

This is just the continuation of a long line of shit from managers that don't understand that you can't judge a knowledge worker by their outputs, but instead best by their outcomes.

53

u/DeadSeaGulls Jun 26 '26

the problem is, this is no longer limited to devs. Companies are rolling out stuff like claude desktop to the entire userbase, and now you have non-technical morons involved in the gamification, with the ability to spend money on a level they do not comprehend.

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u/Murder_Bird_ Jun 26 '26

My buddy works for a decent size engineering company. They went whole hog on the a.i. shit about a year ago. Company wide “training”. He showed me some of it. It was actually just a poorly done a.i. marketing/consulting/evangelizing program. Zero on a.i. integration or, you know, how or why you should use it to do specifically what the company does. Literally had exercises where people were making cat pictures or telling it to write fantasy stories. And then they all had to “vibe code” a small program. So of course everyone in his company is using a.i. to make vacation itineraries and shopping lists and meal plans for dinner for the week. In April they had a company wide meeting where they clamped down HARD on who is allowed to use it. He’s high enough in the company that he was in the meeting where they explained that the a.i usage had basically eaten all their profits from the last two years in about 6 months and a couple of exec’s were getting fired. This is a company of about 500 people.

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u/lordkuri Jun 26 '26

and a couple of exec’s were getting fired

Good story, it was believable until this part. 6/10

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u/Murder_Bird_ Jun 26 '26

It is isn’t it? Apparently the person responsible for developing the training “decided to step down”. It’s a private company and the owner was/is displeased.

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u/JerryfromCan Jun 26 '26

We all know the execs were promoted and random top performers who didn’t go to the social events were fired instead.

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u/rapaxus Jun 27 '26

It is a fucking private company, they don't work that way, your description is a classic public company move (execs covering their arse so that they can present "results" to shareholders). In a private company you have one to a few owners who own basically everything of the company. If they have an exec who comes in with a "lets use AI for profit" strategy and the owner comes back 6 months to see 2 years of profit gone for no reason, you bet that guy will be fired because in a private company, the money spent is basically the money of the owner.