My German mom
Laura Ramoso is a comedian and the daughter of a German mom, an Italian dad, and has a crunchy granola Canadian aunt (wow – what a house that must be like to grow up in). This whole series of her imitations is nothing but pure gold.
Tokenmaxing is the new ‘lines of code’ dumb metric
When we measure effort instead of value, we lose sight of what we are trying to achieve
Like lines of code produced per day and story points, AI token usage is now being tracked by most large tech companies. Even to the point performance reviews depend on high usage.
The natural response: tokenmaxing. Tokenmaxing is a way of using AI that absorbs tremendous amounts of AI tokens without regard to efficacy.
- Prompt flooding: stuffing massive codebases, documentation, and context into every prompt, burning tokens on context the model doesn’t actually need.
- Agent swarms: running multiple AI agents in parallel to maximize code output, regardless of whether the work is coordinated or coherent.
- Background loops: keeping AI sessions or agents running continuously in the background, racking up token spend without clear ownership of what is being produced — or why.
Bryan ONeill finds the better question is to ask does this reduce friction for a user, close a gap in a workflow, or improve reliability for a customer – or is it merely ‘activity’.
He argues, and I have also found, that spec-driven development is far better: a method where engineers write detailed specifications first and AI generates code against them. But the spec should now go further and be the place where engineering intent and business value get defined together. The spec is where you answer, “Why does this matter, and what problem are we solving?” before a single token gets spent.
Papal document on AI – Magnifica Humanitas
Each generation inherits the task of shaping its own era, of guiding history to become a place where the dignity of every person is safeguarded, justice is promoted and fraternity is made possible. Yet every era also runs the risk of creating an inhumane and more unjust world. Whenever humanity is in danger of marring its true identity, we Christians lift our eyes to the Incarnate God, knowing that it is “only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of humanity truly becomes clear.”
Pope Leo XIV has released his very large encyclical letter MAGNIFICA HUMANITAS – SAFEGUARDING THE HUMAN PERSON IN THE TIME OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE.
Definitely give it a read.
A lot of truth to this
We all know the super-hard worker that puts in long hours and gets everything done. And – ironically – a lot of times they never get promoted.
I don’t agree with everything, but here I think he hits the nail on the head: high performers often get stuck being “heroes” in operational meetings/roles while remaining invisible to the people who actually authorize promotions.