People are using « tokens used » as productivity metric ?!

[einarwh@mastodon.social]

@romeu Checkmates Goodhart's law by being a terrible metric even when not measured.

[einarwh@mastodon.social]

@romeu It's probably the best possible metric for how hard you're cargo culting though, so it depends on your aims.

[jadam_fr@hachyderm.io]

@romeu
I read a story somewhere of a developer setting up a token burning script that builds badly designed cities in Sim City...

[dupdob@piaille.fr]

@jadam_fr @romeu
Hence, we need to be specific: token used to generate code is a BS metric, where BS stands for beyond satanic.

[sanityinc@hachyderm.io]

@jkb @romeu "statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged"

[markus@mast.uxp.de]

@romeu number of left clicks

[musevg@23.social]

@romeu
It's like Dotcom eras "Cash burn rate", but this time it's AI data centers burning the planet.

[jeantranscene@mastodon.social]

@romeu Someome came to me the other day asking why my token count was so low. I didn't realize that was a productivity metric. WTF.

[sebastiansolidwork@mastodon.social]

@romeu Could be "air breathed".
Code lines are least an outcome, but tokens are a resource you spent to create outcome.
Like breathing, typing, Watts used by your computer, etc.

[lenotaire@mastodon.social]

@romeu I do remember when at work they were using the "committed lines of code" metric. One week I managed to do a SINGLE line change. Fixing a bug which haunted us for months. As they finally acknowledged, the main issue was not the change but knowing exactly where it was needed. The metric had been since buried

[rubdos@mastodon.social]

@romeu Hmm. What about kLOC/token?

[renardboy@mastodon.social]

@romeu I for one measure my car's quality by how much fuel it burns

[renardboy@mastodon.social]

@lenotaire @romeu $9995 for knowing where to tap.

[jmax@mastodon.social]

@romeu I'm gonna prompt me a new minivan!

[lu_leipzig@troet.cafe]

@romeu ...from the people who brought us megawatts as a unit of computing power and "compute" as a noun.

[wordshaper@weatherishappening.network]

@romeu It's been interesting watching people compete to see who can burn the most money, time, and resources. I expect this will come out about as well as you'd expect.

[procrvstinvtion@infosec.exchange]

@romeu I’ve read about token allotment being a contract negotiation. “Salary isn’t the big argument anymore, token allotment is” to quote an ai bro

[isaackuo@spacey.space]

@romeu I asked LLM AI to tell me what productivity metric we should use and it told me LLM AI tokens used.

I also asked my coke dealer what productivity metric we should use and he told me grams of coke used.

I don't trust my coke dealer but I sure do absolutely trust my LLM AI.

[johnofrobotz@mastodon.girolab.foo]

@romeu as soon as "Prompt Engineers" became a thing, this was bound to happen. Also terrible, but at least SLOC metrics had review and testing built in.

[inthehands@hachyderm.io]

@romeu @cammerman

Our whole society is rife with this: mistaking consumption for productivity