Telling people “use more ai” was always a profoundly stupid direction. “Ship more stuff faster, use AI if it helps, get paid the same” would be anti-labor but at least sensible.
If selling widgets the customer probably doesn’t care if you used a screwdriver or a drill. They just want their widget. Mandating drill usage is stupid.
That capex number in the article is a big part of it. $200 billion spent to generate $1-2 billion a month in revenue is wasteful, and people at the top are feeling the pressure to justify that expense.
The people who need the line to keep going up rely on other smaller lines to always keep going up.
At my job they’ve explicitly called out AI Usage and Aptitude as a core requirement for performance. So you are damn right I am juicing numbers up.
Reminds me of a job I had where we got scored based on the number of issues closed. Suddenly, every minor typo or style disagreement became its own issue. We’d close hundreds of issues a day wordsmithing on comments.
Next steps? The bosses start using the AI tools to summarize the usage of the emoyees to make sure they are using it for the right things. Then employees start subtly prompt injecting their bosses LLM to give them more favorable usage scores. And the sea boils as the arms race to see who can burn more tokens to make investors happy.
Well that’s what happens when you make it part of your performance review.
Tax the shit out of data centers. Let them pay for the infrastructure they use and all this nonsense goes away.
The Great Silicon Valley Token Fire of 2026 continues.
Usage score? Retarded executive management.
i hope the people pushing this bullshit are identified and will have their water and energy tokens reduced accordingly in our post-apocalyptic ecototalitarian future.
Nice example of Goodhart’s law in action.
Tokenistic usage of a tokenised metric
Shocking!!
They want to find the best tokenist!
It’s what I’m doing.
