40 minutes ago

Greg Thomas

Counting Token Shock

Counting Lines of Code became…

Counting Number of Unit Tests Generated became…

Generating the number of class files became…

Ensuring we had everything commented, which became…

An unlimited number of TODOs in our code.

And now we are counting Tokens of usage and surprise, surprise – we are gamifying and overusing them so that our metrics look inflated.

I AM SHOCKED!!!!

Yes, your team should be using AI.

But if you’re measuring your team by their token consumption, it’s a lazy, easy metric.

Instead, why not look at;

  • Reusable skill consumption that gets shared with the team
  • Routines or Agents that people are leveraging to create more time in their day?
  • How much value is created for the team?
  • How many iterations are we having to go over code that embeds into our framework with minimal revision?
  • etc

As with development metrics of the past, the first metric identified is always the laziest.

Want more? Check out my book Code Your Way Up – available as an eBook or Paperback on Amazon (CAN and US).  I’m also the co-host of the Remotely Prepared podcast.