Goodhart’s law is alive and well. Even more so in these AI-hyped times. When you measure token usage, you get tokenmaxxing: Developers burning tokens for the sake of burning tokens, because that’s what management is tracking. The internal Claudeonomics scoreboard at Meta ranked developers by token use, and the top-scoring developer consumed 281 billion tokens. Even using only Opus 4.6 pricing, that would still have cost Meta $1.4 million.

Jensen Huang of Nvidia has said that he would be alarmed if a developer’s token usage was less than half his salary.

The obvious next step is dieselmaxxing, where truckers compete to burn the most fuel.

Or maybe you could measure shipped value, not consumed tokens?