Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live Tokenmaxxing

Tokenmaxxing was just a way to force employees to start leveraging AI in a meaningful way.

For companies that have measured performance based on token spend, they can now dial it back. Employees have learned to leverage AI for things they wouldn’t have prior. Now they know what’s possible and what’s not.

No one is stupid enough to always measure performance based on token spend and have unlimited budget. It was always a temporary thing to transition the employees to a new world.

Management felt like employees weren't leveraging AI fast enough. That's why in 2025, there were many mainstream articles about how CEOs were forcing their employees to use AI or get fired. Tokenmaxxing was just the other extreme. Companies will arrive at an equilibrium.

There's no need to overthink this.

Edit: One reply cited this X post as an example of why management needed to do this. Trying to change a company with hundreds/thousands/tens of thousands of employees is hard. You have to send one simple message at a time. https://x.com/danluu/status/1487228574608211969?lang=en

Better title more in line with the content of the article would have been: The reports of tokenmaxxing’s death are greatly exaggerated.

Pet peeve of mine is nonsensical usage of the x is dead, long live x.

What is meant by a "loop" here? Just repeating the same prompt until you get the desired result? Are subsequent repetitions too close to each other?

Brute forcing positive outcomes by spending more tokens until a happy path manifests does not solve the underlying comprehension (and liability) problem.

I fear a world where critical software is stood up with increasingly non-human governed abstraction because it [seems like it] works.

Software engineers as the review terminal in a conveyor of business-led code mass production... coming to a company near you?

Tokenmaxxing was never a thing to begin with. Just because a few companies did it doesn't mean it was a widespread phenomenon.

>I’ve basically never heard a business leader say that they were going to set a bunch of money on fire because it made them feel good.

Really? ~4 years ago our CEO hired a consultant to fly out several times to do team building exercises. We can't afford to do our 3-year server refresh cycle, but the consultant was no problem to pay.

We just recently had branding consultants come in and also spent thousands of dollars (AWS charges) on rebranding all our photos. We operate in a captive market, if you want to operate in our market you are required to subscribe to our service, and if you aren't in our market you can't subscribe. Branding at the end of the day drives 0 sales.

Heck, reminds me of the time a company I was working with hired a new CTO and one of the first things he did was as "server renaming scheme" using obscure (to the US-centric staff) city names from around the world (database servers are Swiss city names, web servers are Denmark, storage is Finland). We went from cattle naming to pet naming, for a CTO that lasted ~6 months.

In my experience company leadership is not quite as thrifty as this article likes to think they are.

It's AI usage mandates now, but rather than focusing on how the current hot topic has ripped through the business world, often without benefit nor repercussions at leadership, I'd prefer to analyze the higher pattern. We've recently experienced such ripples as the metaverse, blockchain/nft/web3, 'the cloud' (and a minor wave of cloud gaming). There was even a teacup buzz of 'apis', oddly disconnected from the semantic web.

Why do such fever dreams occur at all? Are they getting more prevalent? More damaging? Do they jepaordize the global economy? Should they be regulated in some fashion?

I can't prove my case, but I think it's a symptom of media manipulation/consolidation, the 'fiduciary duty' delusion, and that shareholders can hold the puppet strings tighter than they used to. More and more, they place their sillytown bets and expect the plebs to dance to them.

“Thing is dead, long live thing” is dead, long live “thing is dead, long live thing.”

Beyond getting momentum going for a cmpany, Tokenmaxxing is lighting money on fire.

The idea of tokenmaxxing reaches different companies in different waves, so it will be discovered in waves and outgrown in waves in companies and industries in their own cycle.

In the long run, tokenmaxxing is like drunken sailor spending. Scaling is almost always about a large component of efficiency, and lighting money on fire in the street can only last so long.