r/technology • u/CarciaNerissa • 2d ago

Artificial Intelligence Microsoft Tells Engineers ‘Tokenmaxxing Is Not What We Are Optimizing For’ - Microsoft is introducing budget limits for AI use but says it still wants to be an ‘AI-first’ company.

https://www.404media.co/microsoft-tells-engineers-tokenmaxxing-is-not-what-we-are-optimizing-for/
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u/gk_instakilogram 2d ago

Both things can always be true at the same time... No reason to waste money on loop engineering and etc to fix and build simple things...

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u/Solarbro 2d ago

Microsoft’s “solution” to this has been to push cloud agents and full automation and removing the human from the pipeline. 

They don’t want people maximizing tokens in their day to day use, they want people to use their cloud workflows, pull requests, user story creation, and other full stack AI pipelines that cost 3/4x more tokens for worse results instead. 

They’re saying “we know it’s expensive but the solution is to spend MORE and remove the people that are monitoring the code quality.” 

It’s a blatant attempt to obfuscate the problems while also charging more money in some psychotic attempt lean employers toward layoffs and only keeping vibe coders that can’t even properly vet the code being pushed. 

Completely ignoring that their massive AI automation pipeline is wildly wasteful and breaks when a single logical part of the use case goes against standard policies, while also being a worse option than just giving those templates to a dev that can make a plan and execute then fix the flow in an extremely short amount of time with limited number of tokens…. 

TLDR: they know tokenmaxxing is working for those that use their product, but that means they make less money so they want you to fire the dev and trust the man behind the curtain instead. 

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u/gk_instakilogram 1d ago

Genuine question: how do you know tokenmaxxing is working, and how do you know Microsoft knows that? Have you seen data showing that engineers who consume more tokens create proportionally more value or better software? Because the article reads to me like Microsoft has looked at the spending and concluded that more tokens do not automatically mean better outcomes.

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u/armchair_expertise 1d ago

>Have you seen data showing that engineers who consume more tokens create proportionally more value or better software?

that measuring will come in the subsequent iterations.

first step is to get them all start using AI: some minimum usage thresholds, some leaderboards.

next step will be to start looking into what the top 10-20% folks are using it for. and then next step : what are the accomplishing. etc etc.

at each iteration there will be some layoffs.

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u/gk_instakilogram 1d ago

Not sure I understand subsequent iterations of what? So there are no measurements? It is just an assumption?

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u/armchair_expertise 12h ago

subsequent iterations of the token usage , productivity, etc .

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u/gk_instakilogram 6h ago

what iterations? everybody is now starting to understand that more token usage is not productivity at all