Something happened on the way to that conclusion that shows you how badly the industry confused production with progress.
Companies started measuring their engineers by how much of the machine they consumed.
Not what they shipped. Not what worked. How many tokens they burned. A token is roughly a word's worth of the machine's attention, and you buy them by the unit.
Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, said it out loud. If you pay an engineer $500,000 a year, and at the end of the year that engineer has not spent at least $250,000 of it on tokens, he said he would be deeply alarmed.
Inside Meta, an employee built a dashboard that ranked eighty-five thousand colleagues by how many tokens they had consumed. The company burned sixty trillion tokens in a single month. One individual averaged two hundred and eighty-one billion of them, which on public pricing is well over a million dollars of spending by one person.
I said at the time what I still think. Token maxing is a very stupid way to lose money.
They worked it out. That dashboard was killed two days after a reporter found it. Meta's chief technology officer, who had been encouraging the whole thing, wrote that nobody should be using these tools just for the sake of using them, and that token usage alone is not a measure of impact of any kind. Uber burned through its entire year's budget for a coding agent by April. Microsoft told its staff plainly that this is not what we are optimizing for.
Now think about what an incentive like that actually produces.
Imagine a government announced tomorrow that every good Christian in the country receives $250,000 a year. Or every good Muslim. Pick whichever one you like, it works the same. Within a month, near enough the whole country is Christian, or the whole country is Muslim. The mosques are full. The churches are full. Everybody knows the words.
Now ask the only question that matters. How many of them actually believe?
Pay people for the outward sign of a thing and you will get the outward sign of that thing, in enormous quantity. So what happened to the thing itself?
It got quietly replaced by its own measurement. Engineers rewarded for consumption produce consumption. They generate code that nobody asked for, in volume, to move up a leaderboard, and it lands in the same place as the code somebody did ask for. Output is easy to count and correctness is not, so the organization measures the half it can see, rewards it, and gets more of it. A journal editorial put the reason in one sentence: prompting models and generating results is straightforward, but output evaluation is not.