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> by being the one to discover the way of the future

This is my understanding too. The underlying assumption is that action leads to information, iterations lead to enlightenment. So from an org's point of view, tokenmaxxing means encouraging everyone to explore as much as they can. Of course, token volume should not be the only metric - tokenmaxxing is just a catchy phrase.

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> action leads to information, iterations lead to enlightenment

So doing something (action) creates something new (more information), and iterating on that new information leads to the realization there is nothing new left to be learned with that information (enlightenment). Is how I'm interpreting that.

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Yeah this is right. Its about taking the throttle off of experimentation hoping some team suddenly starts shipping a years worth of features in a week and responding to strategic customer demands in near real time. Then copying what works out across the org. (and probably downsizing)
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What those organizations miss is that they drown their teams in organizational red tape. The way to the future isn't tokenmaxxing - it's cutting back on process noise.
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My impression of companies pushing AI so heavily is that they are basically being forced to do it by it merely existing. Imagine if AI really is as powerful as it is suggested to be and you didn't jump on the bandwagon. Then you would be behind. So by it existing and other companies using it, you have to as well because even if it turns out to be a failure at least everyone else will have failed too and you are on an even playing field.
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You could kind of use that line of thinking to justify spending on anything.
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There is a fad every few years that uses similar thinking to justify spending. Sometimes they work out sometimes they don't. But they never work out as good as the most optimistic predictions.
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I commented on wasteful AI spending, and my father immediately started talking about how he "went through that a couple of times" as a manager at an oil company.

The unusual thing is perhaps how global and cross industry it seems.

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> Sometimes they work out sometimes they don't

Genuinely asking: for which fads was it actually beneficial to jump in during the hype phase? Was there ever anything so critical that there was some huge disadvantage if you didn't adopt it right away?

ETA: I suppose the complicating factor, at least for B2B, is "customers demanding $fad", particularly when the purchasing decision makers don't actually understand what $fad is (e.g., "cloud", "blockchain", "ai", ...). If you don't become "$fad native" right away, you lose the Dunning-Kruger segment of the market.

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That's what throws me off about the AI hype. I've lived through plenty of other hype cycles, but none had such rapid adoption as this during the hype phase. Usually its a bunch of early adopters and a few doomed startups, with the big established (non tech) companies never fully jumping in, and then by the time they might have considered it, the fad died.

Even "cloud" which did stick around and actually did pan out, didn't see such immediate adoption during the hype. There were a lot of companies that stayed on-prem for a long time, many which still are, and none of them imploded for not jumping on the hype.

Why is the FOMO so strong with AI this time around? I don't ever recall being told "spend as much money on AWS as you possibly can!" during the cloud hype...

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Usually, someone extracts genuine value at the expense of everything else IMO. And the enshittification continues apace.
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Not on anything but on some things like “Nobody Ever Got Fired for Buying IBM”
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To the extent that figuring out the true automation will lead to layoffs, that knowledge will quickly spread as the laid-off knowledge workers are available for hiring.
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Agree and I have wondered behind close doors if this is not the mental model. You need to spend money to see what is working this was simply a way to see that.
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This is insightful. It does sort of feel like the search for the Northwest passage.
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My hot take: The way of the future is local LLMs.

The AI equivalent of the PC revolution isn’t quite here yet, but it’s the only way forward.

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I agree. We don't need a nondeterministic 10quadrillion vector model. We need an deterministic expert on our narrow business. Something small, that can be run on the 2026 version of the spare PC under the CTOs desk.
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It will always be worse compared to a centralized approach where hardware utilization can remain high. Except in case which demand low latency which most development things do not need. It's okay if it takes an extra 100ms for a code review to take place.
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Eh, I also saw it as a rather blatant attempt to undermine the bargaining power of the Software Engineer (which had grown to insane proportions over the years) - both in working conditions and raw cash money.

In many cases it really didn’t/doesn’t matter if the AI automation actually works, just that people think it could - and hence leave money on the table.

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> insane

Not sure if you mean this in a good or bad way.

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Good/bad entirely depends on if you are management/shareholders, or the engineer in question. It was pretty nuts either way though eh? End of an era
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