Tokenmaxxing
The stuff I'm hearing is just insane. People are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on tokens? Guys, what are you shipping?
I am seeing people fully enraptured by illusions of productivity. They have swarms of agents coordinated by Byzantine Octopus harnesses. They're munging thousands of tokens a second. They're doing all this stuff, churning unfinished marginalia faster than ever before. Spinning their wheels and shipping absolutely jack shit for their customers.
Someone once pointed out that psychedelic drugs give their users the feeling of insight, but not actual insight. You wake up in the morning and you remember you had unlocked the mysteries of the universe, but all you can find are some spirals you scrawled on a notepad. Similarly, some engineers are falling all the way down the rabbit hole to the feeling of productivity, doing Heroic Doses of tokens on their way to True Productivity. Inevitably, they will reach psychosis before enlightenment.
On a serious note, we're getting a lot of utility from AI for engineering at our company. I think we would really struggle to burn more than $5K per engineer per month. It turns out that extra-high-thinking mode on ultra-speed doesn't actually get you that much. Admittedly, we have a small codebase, but we have good tools -- and most of our problems are about thinking, understanding, and navigating real-world constraints. And I expect that's pretty much the same for most companies.
Maybe if you're a big, established company with a 10M LOC codebase, you blow through the context much faster and can spend more money, but at that point -- do you really want to ship millions of lines of code a month? Aren't you concerned about stability? (I can think of a few valid exceptions, but for most F1000s this is just a non-starter.)