What follows is a version of an email I sent our entire R&D team about an explicit goal and deliberate action we’ll take to become twice as productive through our embrace of AI.
Darragh Curran
Jun 13, 2025
"Tokenmaxxing" is the latest corporate trend taking over the tech world, but is it actually measuring developer productivity—or is it just burning a monumental hole in company finances?
In this episode of Internet of Bugs, Carl breaks down the origins of tokenmaxxing, from Jensen Huang’s podcast comments to prestigious VC letters pushing AI-driven developer metrics. We explore the terrible history of trying to measure programmer productivity (like counting lines of code), how Goodhart's law ruins these systems, and why massive tech companies might actually be incentivizing this slop just to train their own internal AI models.
Furthermore, we look at the financial reality of the AI bubble, upcoming tech IPOs, and why shipping dead code or hiding bugs behind feature flags can cause catastrophic real-world losses (like the 2012 Knight Capital Group meltdown).
💡 SUPPORT THE CHANNEL ON PATREON:
Join our Friday Patreon Q&A Zoom calls to talk about upcoming videos, tech trends, and industry superstitions sooner!
👉 / internetofbugs
- 00:00 What is "Tokenmaxxing"?
- 00:55 Where the Trend Started (Nvidia & VCs)
- 02:03 The Nightmare of Corporate Token Leaderboards
- 02:24 How Do We Actually Measure Good Code?
- 03:52 Lines of Code, Story Points, and Failed Metrics
- 05:01 Goodhart's Law & Gaming the System
- 05:39 Why Big Tech Wants You Burning Tokens
- 06:49 The Superstitions of Software Engineering (LeetCode & Agile)
- 07:55 The Danger of Dead Code & The $440M Bug
- 09:17 The Real Solution
- 10:47 The AI Bubble's "Groundhog Day" IPO Forecast
#Tokenmaxxing #SoftwareEngineering #AIBubble #DeveloperProductivity #TechTrends #Programming #TechIndustry #InternetOfBugs
// Sources
// Origins
https://the-decoder.com/nvidia-ceo-je...
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/20/te...
https://a16z.com/there-are-only-two-p...
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/a16z-u...
https://www.notboring.co/p/a16z-the-p...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrees...
// What companies are doing
/ metas_internal_leaderboard_ranks_employees...
https://fortune.com/2026/04/09/meta-k...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvg...
https://www.firstround.com/ai/shopify
https://gaiinsights.com/blog/the-ceo-...
https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/sh...
https://www.forrester.com/blogs/what-...
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazo...
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-...
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-...
// Programming History Mentioned
https://maseconomics.com/goodharts-la...
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/362929...
https://junit.org/
https://www.henricodolfing.ch/en/case...
https://blog.statsig.com/how-to-lose-...
// AI limitations
https://epoch.ai/blog/will-we-run-out...
// Tokenmaxxing backlash
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-ind...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=...
https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-...
// Financial irregularities (just the most recent tip of the massive iceberg)
https://www.wheresyoured.at/anthropic...
https://www.thestreet.com/latest-news...
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en...
https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/20/ant...