It feels to me that a good part of the industry is using token count numbers similarly to how the lines-of-code-produced metric was used years ago. There was a time when the number of lines written daily or monthly was an important metric in programmer productivity, until it became clear that it’s a terrible thing to focus on. A lines-of-code metric can easily be gamed by writing boilerplate or throwaway code. Also, the best developers are not necessarily those who write the most code; they’re the ones who solve hard problems for the business quickly and reliably with – or without – code!
Similarly, the number of tokens a dev generates can easily be gamed, and if this metric is measured then devs will indeed game it. But doing so generates a massive accompanying AI bill!
Gergely Orosz in The Pulse: ‘Tokenmaxxing’ as a weird new trend.