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- Hacker News
- Brute forcing positive outcomes by spending more tokens until a happy path manifests does not solve the underlying comprehension (and liability) problem.
I fear a world where critical software is stood up with increasingly non-human governed abstraction because it [seems like it] works.
Software engineers as the review terminal in a conveyor of business-led code mass production... coming to a company near you?
by fraywing - This is like hell, if hell was being stuck on a really poorly-maintained uncomfortable rollercoaster forever.by dofm
- Better title more in line with the content of the article would have been: The reports of tokenmaxxing’s death are greatly exaggerated.
Pet peeve of mine is nonsensical usage of the x is dead, long live x.
by jtrn - Tokenmaxxing was just a way to force employees to start leveraging AI in a meaningful way.
For companies that have measured performance based on token spend, they can now dial it back. Employees have learned to leverage AI for things they wouldn’t have prior. Now they know what’s possible and what’s not.
No one is stupid enough to always measure performance based on token spend and have unlimited budget. It was always a temporary thing to transition the employees to a new world.
Management felt like employees weren't leveraging AI fast enough. That's why in 2025, there were many mainstream articles about how CEOs were forcing their employees to use AI or get fired. Tokenmaxxing was just the other extreme. Companies will arrive at an equilibrium.
There's no need to overthink this.
Edit: One reply cited this X post as an example of why management needed to do this. Trying to change a company with hundreds/thousands/tens of thousands of employees is hard. You have to send one simple message at a time. https://x.com/danluu/status/1487228574608211969?lang=en
by aurareturn - > That’s no longer true. We’ve entered a different regime, where spending more tokens generally results in better results. We call this “compounding correctness” — the more tokens you spend on getting a task correct, the more likely you’ll get a good outcome. We talked about this a bit at the last in person Agentics meetup:
Have we? Is it generally the case that the more tokens you spend, you better results you get? This take is so weird I suspect author somehow financially benefits from tokenmaxxing.
by ambicapter - The implication that tokenmaxxing was an intentional and thoughtfully considered approach rather than blind hype-following by an overpaid manager class who are too far removed from value to understand the downsides of LLMs is hysterical beyond belief.by baconmania
- > Like, imagine if some serious business leader, like, idk, Mark Zuckerberg, decided to announce that Meta was going to burn money.
Like ... pivoting to the "metaverse" and changing the company name to show he's serious.
by red_admiral - Folks have been saying “things are different now, the agents are now compounding success instead of error” for at least a year now, but I just don’t see it. I was lucky enough to receive a weeklong $50k per head AI training from the people saying these things, and one of their few helpful concrete recommendations was to constantly clear context all the time, to avoid things going off the rails.
However, I think finding security vulnerabilities is one use case where it doesn’t matter. Tokenmaxxing is absolutely effective for that. We as an industry are in the middle of adopting very expensive, complex continuous fuzzers.
by et1337