From Token-Ring to Token-Bling
On the meaning of "token" and Vanity Metrics ...
Chris here from a slightly overcast but always cozy San Sebastian (not Amsterdam this time).
I was browsing through my feeds this morning while sipping a… lets call it an “espresso”, and I stumbled upon a piece from The Pragmatic Engineer about a new Silicon Valley trend called “Tokenmaxxing”. And I have to confess something: every time I see the word “token” anywhere in tech, my deformed, aging tech mind immediately screams: “Token-Ring”…
I know this because I am old, and back in the day, I actually deployed Token-Ring networks in Fortune 500 companies. For the younger folks who never had the pleasure of dealing with thick cables and Multistation Access Units (MAU), Token-Ring was a local area network protocol where computers physically passed an electronic “token” around a loop. You only had one token. If your machine had the token, it had permission to transmit data. It was orderly, it was polite, and it was agonizingly slow…
You respected the token. You cherished the token…
Now, let’s fast forward to 2026 and look at “Tokenmaxxing”. According to the article, developers at giants like nVidia, Meta, Microsoft, and Salesforce are actively trying to burn as many AI tokens (the units of data processed by LLMs like Claude or Copilot) as humanly possible. Why? Because management set up internal leaderboards and minimum spend quotas to track who is the most “AI-native”… Sigh…
Devs are literally asking their AI agents to read massive, irrelevant documentation to answer basic questions 10x slower, or prompting complex code generation for projects they have zero intention of building, just to throw the results in the digital trash. Over at Meta, employees reportedly burned through 60.200.000.000.000 tokens in a single month. Yes, 60,2 trillion. If paying retail, that’s roughly a $900.000.000,00 API bill… WTF!…
It is incredibly silly, there is absolutely no point to it, and it is clearly just a craze. But let’s be honest with ourselves: tokenmaxxing is nothing new. It’s just Goodhart’s Law dressed up in a shiny new AI wrapper. When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure…
Think about the classic analogue cases that map perfectly to this nonsense:
Lines of Code (LOC) Maxxing: The oldest trick in the book. “Oh, the managers are tracking productivity by how many lines of code I write? Watch me deploy the most verbose, unoptimized, 1.000-line
switchstatement known to humanity instead of a simple array lookup.”Toner-maxxing: The 90s office classic. You needed to look incredibly busy for the director walking the floor, so you sent a 500-page blank document to the heavy-duty LaserJet. The relentless mechanical whirring of the printer made you look like a highly critical asset doing very important corporate things.
Green-status Maxxing: Strapping a desk fan or an electric toothbrush to your mouse so your Microsoft Teams status stays a productive, healthy green while you’re out buying stroopwafels at the Albert Heijn.
Health Maxxing: That corporate FitBit you got to see if you are actually contribute to your health. Healthy-body, healthy-mind and ready to put the new-found energy and mindset into the job… If you owned a dog, he got used wearing it on its tail.
Optimizing for an input rather than an output is fundamentally broken. It’s like measuring the skill of a cyclist here in Amsterdam by how many bicycle chains they snap in a month. “Wow, Maarten snapped 4 chains this week, he must be pedaling incredibly hard!” No, Maarten just doesn’t know how to use grease, and he’s costing us a fortune in repairs…
The irony is beautiful, though. In the Token-Ring days, we waited patiently for one single token to do real, tangible work. Today, developers are hoarding and setting millions of tokens on fire to do absolutely nothing…
Eventually, the CFOs are going to look at these massive AI bills, realize they are paying $170,00 a month per developer for generated garbage, and the leaderboards will vanish overnight...
Pro-Tip: Ignore the gamified noise, keep a calm head, and just focus on shipping solid software. Please.
Now, I’m going to grab another coffee and maybe stare at a picture of an old Token-Ring adapter just to calm my nerves… Maybe relive the IBM vs Madge game that was going on at that time… God, I miss those days…
What’s the most ridiculous vanity metric you’ve ever had to game at work? Let me know below!