Tokenmaxxing: When AI Productivity Becomes Productivity Theater
Roose names "tokenmaxxing" — engineers competing on internal leaderboards for token consumption — but buries the only question that matters: nobody measures output quality. One OpenAI engineer burned 210 billion tokens in a week; a single Anthropic user ran up $150K in a month. The leaderboards track input volume, not output value. This is lines-of-code metrics reborn: Goodhart's Law applied to AI inference. The sharper signal is a Figma user consuming $70K in Claude tokens through a $20/month account, revealing that every SaaS platform offering AI at flat rate is running a margin time bomb. The companies that win this cycle won't consume the most tokens; they'll have the best ratio of useful output to tokens spent. That measurement layer doesn't exist yet.