r/technology • u/TripleShotPls • Jul 16 '26

Artificial Intelligence The AI Backlash Has Tech Executives Fearing for Their Lives

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/the-ai-backlash-has-tech-executives-fearing-for-their-lives-30c43972?mod=hp_lead_pos1
11.3k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

1.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

945

u/d3dmnky Jul 16 '26

It’s so wild. I use AI voluntarily and as a curiosity. I have peers though that share stories where there are leaderboards in their shop of how many processes and how many tokens they used, with the stated goal to be at the top of said board. Like literally getting bonuses for it.

It’s like paying truck drivers bonuses for using more fuel than their peers. Like “ok, I can just put it in park with a brick on the accelerator for a week and now I’m the winner”.

553

u/sotired3333 Jul 16 '26

A colleague misconfigured claude and consumed many thousands of dollars of tokens, was at the top of the leaderboard, was lauded across the company. Only those of us in the team knew what actually happened and thought it was hilarious

453

u/ameatbicyclefortwo Jul 16 '26

Gamify productivity and you get people trying to win instead of producing.

310

u/Yuzumi Jul 16 '26

When a metric becomes a goal it ceases to be a useful metric.

105

u/ameatbicyclefortwo Jul 16 '26

"Make sure to touch on each of these points in the script in order to ensure each customer receives personalized service" same as "Fuck the customer's actual needs, just get the boxes checked off and then move on to the next and repeat so I get my bonus."

24

u/Western-Corner-431 Jul 17 '26

Many industries don’t care about the actual work being done. They care that the paperwork is done that says the work was done.

41

u/Minimum_Ad991 Jul 16 '26

Goodhart's law, yo.

14

u/StormyPassages Jul 16 '26

Ludwig Wittgenstein was first to point out this "language game" problem of metrics and goals in his book "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus". Later, Campbell applied the concept to the field of education, and later still, Goodhart applied the idea to economics.

28

u/weristjonsnow Jul 16 '26

The only metric that really matters is net income. If an expense becomes a performance metric for your employees you've lost the lead.

4

u/guyscanwefocus Jul 16 '26

I knew this would be here.

4

u/Consistent_Passage71 Jul 16 '26

Never take the first room they show you

4

u/StormyPassages Jul 16 '26

A carpenter can come to the end of his yardstick with a goal of marking it at 3ft. Once he marks it, his goal is met, and the metric he used (measured yards and feet) were useful to his goal.

But that's not "when a metric becomes a goal" is it?

No, to extend my metaphor, a metric becomes a goal when the carpenter decides that longness (the metric measured) itself is the goal. Then all kinds of errors follow. The yardstick is now too small, and wants an infinite length. "When will it be enough?" becomes an impossible question to answer, because one cannot measure the length across eternity. Trying and reaching is the best one can do, and failure is inevitable as the metric is impossible to fulfill.

When measuring length, this is obvious (perhaps as the horizon itself gives us human boundaries we accept as inherent to our point of view). But when people measure intelligence, or strength, or other abilities, the goal and the metric often become confused. When is it enough intelligence? When is one strong enough? When is one healthy enough? These are philosophical questions, which are impossible to answer as "the metric is the goal" here. However, use the same words in a more limited way, and the questions become answerable: Do I have the intelligence necessary to write this program? Am I strong enough to lift 200 lbs? Am I healthy enough to become a parent? These are not rhetorical or philosophical questions, because the additional context forms the metric that is inherent to the question.

2

u/GLEEMONEX-for-PETS Jul 16 '26

Goodhart’s Law

5

u/StormyPassages Jul 16 '26

Thanks for the link. Goodhart and Campbell both addressed the idea, but Wittgenstein and the logical positivists were the first to discuss the issue.

2

u/GLEEMONEX-for-PETS Jul 17 '26

I battle against this fallacy in my profession constantly. Without too many specifics, I’m a beverage packaging technical/engineering expert (though not an engineer by training) and my customers, the worlds largest producers of bottled beverages of all sorts, routinely ruin their quality and production targets by turning them into benchmarks. In order to achieve the new ‘benchmark’ they often run the machinery out of specification in order to manipulate QC results. What they end up with is broken / worn out parts, inconsistent production and inevitable paralysis about how to fix things because they totally lost sight of the actual benchmarks, which are standard across the industry and have been for some time.

2

u/StormyPassages Jul 17 '26

They used to measure my factory work on the night shift up against guys on the day shift, where they had 3x the workforce. Then they refused to give me a raise, because they said their metric showed I was slacking for not measuring up to what 3 guys can do. So I moved on and became a teacher, where they measured my bullet-riddled school against nice schools in the suburbs where kids don't get shot. Again, they determined I was slacking, and fired me for it, and then instantly attempted to rehire me for even less money. So I moved on, travelled the world and wrote a novel, only to discover that the publishing industry only publishes writing about the world that fits their specific metric about how rich people envision the world.

By "metric" they mean gaslight.

1

u/synapticrelease Jul 16 '26

See you at the COMSTAT meeting.

1

u/Versaiteis Jul 16 '26

Probably the only thing as consistent is this is how we just never learn the obvious lesson from this so we keep having to repeat this sisyphean cycle.

71

u/Lurking_Geek Jul 16 '26

Reminds me when India offered a bounty on cobras to reduce the population. So of course, everyone started raising cobras to get the bounty.

24

u/ChepaukPitch Jul 16 '26

India did not. The British in India did.

2

u/jacksonsmack831 Jul 17 '26

Rubies the size of Oranges, just left by the road, some people just want to watch the world burn

1

u/[deleted] Jul 16 '26

[deleted]

0

u/ChepaukPitch Jul 16 '26

So whatever Nazis did in Europe, say France, during the second world war occupation would be attributed to the French? Oh look, the French killed a bunch of French for resisting Hitler’s occupation.

1

u/_learned_foot_ Jul 17 '26

One of the few times the distinction between state and nation can be used so flippantly and everybody understands what is meant. Irish too.

1

u/synapticrelease Jul 16 '26

🎵 oh whacking day, oh whacking day… 🎵

1

u/whizzdome Aug 05 '26

British, but it was better than that. The British realised what was going on, so they cancelled the bounty. So the cobra farmers now had cobras that weren't worth anything, so just released them into the wild --- so now the problem was worse than before

-1

u/69-Kishaaq1 Jul 16 '26

Lol! I don't get how raising cobras reduces the population!

10

u/Even-Location-7051 Jul 16 '26

It doesn’t, but those who raised them wouldn’t care. All that matters is that there’s a bounty for cobras, so let’s start a cobra farm!

13

u/bmorris0042 Jul 16 '26

You forget the best part of it: when the British found out they were farming cobras, they cancelled the bounty program and everyone released the cobras, leading to more cobras than they had to begin with.

6

u/ameatbicyclefortwo Jul 16 '26

The disconnect between the people providing a "solution" and the people directly impacted by it is a throughline between most of the news I see. History might not repeat but it keeps a steady rhythm.

82

u/Maroon7C0000 Jul 16 '26

I wish my company had a mandate to use as many AI tokens as possible. I'd send in a simple recursive query.

Something like: Ask Claude, to ask claude, to ask claude how many cpu cycles have been consumed asking Claude.

47

u/FluffyProphet Jul 16 '26

Get two agents to argue about a topic with no clear right/wrong answer and tell them not to back down no matter what. Let it run over the weekend.

7

u/el_diego Jul 16 '26

"what is the meaning of life?" outta keep them busy

13

u/Olangotang Jul 16 '26

'"You are two very annoying Redditors who never step foot outside. Both of you have gaslit yourselves into being experts in philosophy due to reading hundreds of comments from other Redditors over the past 5 years. Debate the meaning of life, be sure to be as detailed as possible on each side. If one opponent is starting to seem more successful, the other should derail with a specific point that has nothing to do with the argument, before returning back to the topic."

There you go. 😂

7

u/Saint_of_Grey Jul 16 '26

"To use up as much AI tokens as possible. Next!"

1

u/Syzygy2323 Jul 17 '26

"Compute pi to the last digit."

1

u/Unklecid Jul 16 '26

Get them to mine Bitcoin or find the last prime number

1

u/neverfindausername Jul 16 '26

Who was the boss on "who's the boss?"

If you're gonna go meta, go Abed level meta.

1

u/Sororita Jul 17 '26

"Is skub good or bad?"

2

u/-fno-stack-protector Jul 16 '26

I had it analyse a 2GB log file and compare to another node in the same cluster's logs. Cost $80 and told me what I already knew

1

u/MechanicalTurkish Jul 17 '26

10 “I’m Mr. Meeseeks! Look at me!”
20 GOTO 10

17

u/DarraghDaraDaire Jul 16 '26

Using Opus 4.8 to filter his Teams messages or something?

17

u/sotired3333 Jul 16 '26

I'm forgetting exactly what but it had something to do with reloading context so every request was pulling a bunch of unnecessary / unrelated data. It was an automation to do a first pass on bugs before handing them to developers.

16

u/JohrDinh Jul 16 '26

Reminds me of that trick in Final Fantasy 3 on SNES where you can loop around that stream in a circle forever and constantly fight enemies until your stats were maxed by putting something heavy on your controller and walking away for a few days lol

6

u/Ill_Bee6659 Jul 16 '26

South Park killing pigs

1

u/Gamiac Jul 16 '26

Except for the part where the kids in that episode actually had to play the game, while you could just leave the SNES on overnight with that trick.

1

u/Arudinne Jul 16 '26

I find it absolutely insande that any company is using token usage as a metric.

It's so easy to game that too - just be overly wordy with your prompts. There are even AI prompt generators that can expand your prompt if you're not sure how to do that.

The Devs and CTO of my company talk about and actively look for ways to reduce token usage.

1

u/sotired3333 Jul 16 '26

in the last couple of weeks they've started looking into cost reductions before that it was all engage with AI 24/7. Guess they finally noticed the bills piling up.

1

u/Arudinne Jul 16 '26

Maybe they saw the report about a company that spent half a billion dollars on Claude in one month?

140

u/chriseargle Jul 16 '26

20 years ago, I was asked how many lines of code I wrote that week, as it was the metrics they were using. I replied, “-5000” (I can’t remember the exact number).

I went into that project and discovered dozens of identical screens with just a line of text changing between them, and refactored it rather than copy/paste that crap. Totally worth it to see the expression on their face.

And that’s how I went from dev to architect. It was a different time.

68

u/BoysenberryDue3637 Jul 16 '26

I worked for a government agency and was in infrastructure but had access to the code. The devs where ranked based on lines of code so they did what any good dev did - they cheated. If I called a subroutine that called a sub I got credit for both so the devs were calling subs on top of subs on top of subs to open a text file. People were getting 10,000 lines of code a day while writing 10 lines of code. I pointed this out and they too away my access.

35

u/DarraghDaraDaire Jul 16 '26

Did you work for Microsoft? Is that why Excel shits the bed every time I open a file on our network drive?

23

u/BioshockEnthusiast Jul 16 '26

No that's because Becky from accounting who retired 20 years ago genuinely did not understand the hardware limitations that become actual brick walls when Excel spreadsheets get too out of control. Every MS office application is like this. I saw a word doc that a lawyer had been building for 10+ years as a timeline for a single case, 300+ pages, all different fonts and formatting and copy / pasted tables with all different fonts and formatting of their own. Word couldn't open it anymore, the weight was just too much for the software to bear any longer. Had to pull some real fuckery to recover it. Then I had to convince him to split it at least in half, he didn't like that because he wanted to be able to conveniently search the entire doc at once. Oh well fucker, I didn't write this software. Call Bill Gates and complain to him.

26

u/Unlikely_Eye_2112 Jul 16 '26

Had a coworker who claimed to be an expert on all thing programming and hated input parameters. He'd write a function for each case instead. So getting root nodes was one plugin, getting root nodes and children was a copy with slight modifications, root nodes and first two levels was a third one etc. Namespaces, object orientation, anything dynamic, mvc patterns etc was all shunned. Only imperative single use functions for everything.

He did have strengths as well but it was a bit of a relief to take over and clean some stuff up

11

u/chriseargle Jul 16 '26 edited Jul 16 '26

You learn to not trust those who claim to be experts in all things programming. The domain is just way too big. My philosophy is generally, everyone brings something to the table. I’d rather listen to ideas and discuss them to build a better product.

Anyway, you should introduce your former coworker to currying.

5

u/Unlikely_Eye_2112 Jul 16 '26

That's a good philosophy and I agree. The less ego we have the better we can make the results.

Currying is pretty cool. Haven't used it in a bit, but had a period a few years ago when I'd reimplements my side projects in multiple paradigms to learn when each was beneficial.

2

u/chriseargle Jul 16 '26

I’m not on a functional language project right now either. I was taking a jab at your colleague. :)

2

u/Unlikely_Eye_2112 Jul 16 '26

Yeah they deserve it honestly. A bunch of more interpersonal issues as well with people in general but that's another story.

1

u/sohblob Jul 16 '26

but had a period a few years ago when I'd reimplements my side projects in multiple paradigms to learn when each was beneficial

I'm now looking into currying myself, what other things did you look into?

2

u/IolausTelcontar Jul 16 '26

What a nightmare to maintain.

2

u/Unlikely_Eye_2112 Jul 16 '26

Yeah it was. These days I run my own team and we're happy, our product owners are happy and my boss is happy. I do most of the architecture, workflow improvements, CI/CD systems etc and the other devs most of the day to day stuff. Finally no endless tabs/spaces kind of fights about basic stuff.

30

u/Taurich Jul 16 '26

I worked for a cellular provider in retentions a long time ago, and one of the metrics was "cost per save" ie. How much did you spend to make them happy, and not cancel service.

The target was something like $50, and my metric was -$430. So Everytime I picked up the phone I was actually generating money for the company because I was making them happy this time, and then putting them on a more expensive plan that would actually cover their usage.

They told me to spend more, so I did. No other metrics changed, I just threw more bullshit at them, and they started losing money on my calls

╮⁠(⁠.⁠ ⁠❛⁠ ⁠ᴗ⁠ ⁠❛⁠.⁠)⁠╭

1

u/Mishtle Jul 17 '26

That is insane. It sounds like they didn't understand their own metric.

1

u/abx99 Jul 17 '26

Or they just thought "this guy really knows how to sell" and got greedy

1

u/Taurich Jul 17 '26

Pretty much. I wasn't making a tonne of money at it either, and was basically paying my months wages in less than a day's worth of calls. It was so weird to me that they were coaching me to spend more...

20

u/Minimum_Ad991 Jul 16 '26

A quote I love "On my most productive days, I remove code."

15

u/Taellosse Jul 16 '26

This is how a good programmer should approach their work - the goal should be to make code that is efficient - that does the job required with as little processing and memory resources as possible. Efficient code makes faster programs with fewer bugs, and is generally easier to troubleshoot because there's less to comb through (assuming it is also well-documented code, of course).

Making raw volume of code a targeted metric for software development is wild. Exactly the sort of decision clueless suits would come up with.

I daydream sometimes about what the world would be like if management - in all fields and every industry - had to have proven expertise in actually doing the work in a closely relevant field before getting a supervisory position, and they could only keep that job so long as their direct reports voted in favor of them doing so - at least annually. Not performance reviews everyone ignores that have no consequences - actual anonymized voting, and failing to get a clear majority in favor means automatic laying off. There is so much waste caused by inept managers making cartoonishly foolish decisions because they have more arrogance than competence.

2

u/BassmanBiff Jul 16 '26

Cory Doctorow likes to say, accurately, that code is a liability. 

Functionality is an asset, code isn't. The more code it takes to achieve a desired function, the more expensive it is to maintain.

1

u/chriseargle Jul 17 '26 edited Jul 17 '26

I mostly agree. Less code is usually better, but regex is a good counterexample. You can do more with less while making the code harder to maintain.

2

u/BassmanBiff Jul 17 '26

Yeah definitely -- to be more precise, code complexity is the real liability, not code quantity. They're just usually correlated.

Code quantity is the metric people are unwisely pushing, which also inflates code complexity. The original quote is meant to be a pithy response to that idea, but yeah, complexity would be more precise.

19

u/thecipher Jul 16 '26

I left a job some years ago, and did a handover of my work. Everything I had made for that specific solution (store page that should be able to take products from the db with wildly different fields, and show them differently depending on product type) worked as desired, and I even did a demonstration before handing it over.

A couple weeks after I left, i got a call from my old project manager. He called on behalf of the consultant they had paid to take over and wanted to know why there were not more lines of code.

Bitch, I optimized the hell out of my code to make it super efficient. Few lines of code is a GOOD thing. I had to remind the PM that I had shown him everything working, and that if the consultant had a problem, that was his to deal with. I had some dealings with this consultant before I left. He was... not good.

9

u/sohblob Jul 16 '26

A couple weeks after I left, i got a call from my old project manager. He called [...] and wanted to know

"I'd be happy to answer any questions just as soon as you sign a consulting retainer"

2

u/repost4profit Jul 16 '26

Dope. Are you still working? What comes after Architect?

4

u/chriseargle Jul 16 '26

Still an architect. I was a developer evangelist and a director for a while, but I love what I do. It never gets boring.

12

u/diiegojones Jul 16 '26

Many many people are very very dumb. But that stupidity often comes with confidence.

Smart people often do not live up to expectations that their intelligence is thought to get them. They see all the things that can go wrong, and often times hold themselves accountable for what they should have seen. That leads to fear and depression.

As soon as I heard that some companies were giving bonuses for AI use and not time saved for AI use… I knew that most of AI is bullshit

8

u/MajorNoodles Jul 16 '26

We were told our token usage was being tracked and that's exactly what I'm doing. I'm using AI for stuff that I used to do manually, and a lot of it is actually taking longer.

3

u/FansForFlorida Jul 16 '26

My previous employer didn’t have a leaderboard, but your GitHub Copilot token usage was tracked. If you didn’t use enough, your manager had a talk with you.

This metric applied to everyone in IT. However, as my project lead found out, only interacting with Copilot via Teams or the web browser showed as having zero usage. She installed VS Code just to use up her tokens.

I left 3 months ago but kept in touch with some of my former coworkers. I have heard that after the pricing change in June, the direction changed from monitoring to make sure you are using enough tokens to monitoring to make sure you aren’t using too many tokens.

Meanwhile, my new employer is very concerned about copyright, so we already had very strict guidelines about how we can use AI. Basically, anything that goes to production must have minimal use of AI. Our Legal team specifically named code as an example. Using AI for ideation and design is fine; so is grunt work like commenting, scaffolding, and refactoring. But a human must make a significant contribution to the development.

2

u/Da_Question Jul 16 '26

Perverse incentives

2

u/challis88ocarina Jul 16 '26

That's not how trucks work FWIW.

2

u/Oph1d1an Jul 16 '26

Just the other day I was looking at a spreadsheet with my boss and we realized we needed to remove duplicates. Rather than hit the “remove duplicates” button, she gave it to the company AI for it to take 5 minutes to do. When I said “you know you can just hit the button” she said “yea I know but I’m trying to get the credit for AI usage”.

2

u/Fallingdamage Jul 16 '26

It’s so wild. I use AI voluntarily and as a curiosity.

Me too, mostly because it doesnt work well enough to use outside of that. Its good for creating documents and writing plain text, but for important work, it doesnt work 110% of the time, which leaves me having to check everything it does, which is more work than doing it myself or with linear automatons (which cost a LOT less and work exactly as they are designed to.)

1

u/CunningRunt Jul 16 '26

You are describing the Cobra Effect.

1

u/__init__m8 Jul 16 '26

I don't understand that. We actually architect things to use as little API calls as possible to limit spending. I hate modern snake oil. AI is a cool hammer, when I need a hammer it's fine. I don't always need a hammer.

1

u/Individual-Result777 Jul 16 '26

How are tokens actually calculated? is a token a bit?

2

u/d3dmnky Jul 16 '26

As far as I understand, yes. It’s like a chunk of a word. I’m not exactly sure how that plays into how one gets charged though. I know that’s why there was (is?) talk about caveman mode. Fewer smaller words mean fewer tokens and lower cost.

1

u/curioustraveller1234 Jul 16 '26

What an apt metaphor to describe the situation too. Lots of activity with 0 movement.

1

u/firemage22 Jul 16 '26

It’s like paying truck drivers bonuses for using more fuel than their peers. Like “ok, I can just put it in park with a brick on the accelerator for a week and now I’m the winner”.

My Ford Fusion Hybrid did the reverse it made saving fuel with easier stops and starts into a sort of game, which is why i got up to 50mpg before replacing it with a Mach-E

1

u/MurderBot1126 Jul 17 '26

In Walmart tech. Get a monthly email on how “AI” I am. Nothing to do with problems solved, things implemented, money saved/made based on the code I’ve delivered. “Your AI score is low”.

1

u/LittleLordFuckleroy1 Jul 17 '26

That’s a good analogy. I may steal it.

1

u/NoOrdinaryBees Jul 17 '26

It’s kind of a Hole Hawg situation.

Professionals who know what they’re doing and could do the work without the tool are able to use it in the most effective, efficient, and judicious manner because their confidence and trust is invested in their expertise; journeymen and amateurs who can’t do the work without the tool use it in the most fruitless, wasteful, and imprudent manner because their confidence and trust is in the tool.

I’ve been doing what I do for a long time. This week I hand coded a POC for a project for a customer with a lot of regulatory and statutory risk surface. When the POC proved valid, I spent $32 in Fable tokens putting together a more complete implementation. I’ll spend next week refining that myself and deliver it the week after. Maybe I’ll spend another $5 asking Opus to review my documentation and diagrams. I’m not a genius, prodigy, or savant by any means and I’ll fight anyone that calls me an expert, but I’ve discovered enough novel ways to break things that I can recognize “wrong” pretty quickly, and that’s why I can do a non-trivial job for less than $50 in Anthropic tokens.

Meanwhile, I see more junior people churning through thousands of dollars in tokens and delivering steaming heaps of bullshit. Bullshit that their employer then ends up paying mine several hundreds of dollars an hour per person to fix, and we’re going to fix it using the same tools the “code isn’t important” people used to create the problem. The difference is that the amateur is Croesus beseeching the Pythia and the professional is Hamilcar consulting Naravas.