points by solenoid0937 1 day ago

You say "amazing that it took months to figure this out" as if the answer to the question is obvious.

But it's not. Some FAANGs are doing amazing things with unlimited tokens. Other companies have no clue what to do with tokens, they've just told their engineers to max them.

It really depends on how you're using the tokens. If you're just using them for Codex and Claude Code - yeah, tokenmaxxing is incredibly dumb.

saghm 1 day ago

In other words, people who are productive get more done when you scale up what they're already doing, and people who aren't productive will not magically become productive when you scale up what they're already doing. That's incredibly obvious, because we've seen how this plays out repeatedly in so many different ways (lines of code, commits, tickets closed, etc.), and it has nothing to do with tokens or even programming, but just how trying to manage people works.

steveBK123 1 day ago

> Some FAANGs are doing amazing things with unlimited tokens. Others have no clue what to do with tokens.

Unlimited tokens is different from “use AI a lot or we will fire you, and we are counting token consumption as usage”. Obviously the latter is stupid and yet it was done in many places.

  • SpicyLemonZest 1 day ago

    I'm not convinced it actually was done in many places, although I understand why in a bad job market people don't trust that it isn't happening in secret. Every time I've heard of a token leaderboard or such it's come with a denial that the company is using it as an employee performance metric.

    • steveBK123 1 day ago

      > it's come with a denial that the company is using it as an employee performance metric.

      Surely the anonymous employee feedback polls are totally anonymous too. BigCorp loves you, is family, and would never harm you.

fsloth 1 day ago

> Some FAANGs are doing amazing things with unlimited tokens.

Would love to know what things!

  • arkadiytehgraet 1 day ago

    OP (solenoid0937) is an unfounded AI-hype peddler and an Anthropic shill (check their comment history), do not expect them to provide an actual example of their wild claims.

    • dgellow 23 hours ago

      I checked their history and they seem alright ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

      • arkadiytehgraet 20 hours ago

        Here, just a few examples over the last 9 days, in no particular order of exaggeration magnitude:

        Unsubstantiated claims of 3x-10x productivity at allegedly a FAANG: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48174666

        More claims of the same, still unsubstantiated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48173995

        Even more claims of the same, still nothing of substance: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48173975

        Outlandish claim of using 300$ in tokens in 1 hour at allegedly a FAANG: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48158438

        Ostensibly great things with unlimited tokens at allegedly a FAANG: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48269185

        Complaints about HN "not getting" AI: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48245673

        An attempt to validate vibe-coding in production: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48243651

        Whitewashing Claude degradation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48211638

        More Claude degradation whitewashing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48245784

        Whitewashing Anthropic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48199951

        Promises of coming AI revolution: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48188104

        All of this serves to hype up the LLM technology with absolutely outlandish claims, while also propping up Anthropic online.

        • solenoid0937 19 hours ago

          This is so cool, I have my own fan on HN that cherry picks my comment history to call me a shill!

          • arkadiytehgraet 11 hours ago

            You could have easily disproved my claim by linking your comments with a more balanced or nuanced opinions on the matter, except you cannot, because there is only even more outlandish and wild stuff you say about AI and LLMs.

            • dgellow 10 hours ago

              It‘s perfectly ok to share opinions that aren’t nuanced or balanced. You seem to have something strongly against that specific user, the fact that you felt the need to go through so much of their history, post a massive list of their „suspicious“ comments, and mention in multiple places how they are a shill is pretty concerning imho and doesn’t make you look good at all. Their activity looks fine, they seem to be enthusiastic and optimistic about the technology, but that’s pretty much it.

              And now you’re asking them to somehow disprove they aren’t a shill? How would that even work. You seem unnecessarily antagonistic towards that user

              • arkadiytehgraet 9 hours ago

                It is not just me who finds solenoid0937 account suspicious: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48173975

                I did not have to go through "so much of their history", this is just the last 9 days. There are considerably wilder claims from them earlier, when the account was solely focused on propping up LLM-hype and defending Anthropic.

                We are living through a period of time with one of the potentially most disruptive technologies ever being developed. A lot (A LOT) of money is invested into it, a lot of livelihoods are and might be affected by it, and some people stand to gain A LOT from it. So there are significant interests to sway public opinion in favour of LLMs and AI, to hype it up to unreasonable extent, to muddle the waters of a reasonable discourse. Accounts such as solenoid0937 are unleashed on public forums to achieve that, and because of that we have to take everything they write with a huge grain of salt, or even ignore completely, as there is just no true information in their comments.

                You yourself got baited by them by considering what they wrote seriously regarding "amazing things with unlimited tokens". Now the idea that "LLMs 1) are used in one of FAANGs massively and 2) are used to produce amazing things" is planted. Will you remember later that they did not actually provide any evidence of that? The account has been doing this trick multiple times over the last few weeks.

                For me, as someone who is actually using LLMs in their work, a single balanced comment on the matter would have been more than enough to consider them not being a shill. Unfortunately, instead they have claimed recently that they went completely full-on with agentic coding (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48245721) skipping reviews and pushing to prod directly (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48243651) at a FAANG, no less. And they claimed it in such a manner that this is objectively the only proper way to do the work, and all other approaches are doomed. How is this anything else than peddling unfounded LLM-hype, I do not know.

                The example above might seem like a singular episode, but they have been doing it over and over for the last year and a half, so this is now a pattern. No actual evidence for any of their claims is provided, so the only thing left is AI-hype, and pretty wild at that. So why would a reasonable person, with ostensibly enough money to retire (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48252297), ostensibly working at a FAANG, spend all their days spreading unfounded AI-hype in a degrading manner on HN and defending Anthropic? Given the vested financial interest in the technology, the most plausible answer here is that they are paid to do so.

            • solenoid0937 4 hours ago

              Every time I've tried to engage you in debate you just call me a shill so there's no point. Love ya too though!

              • arkadiytehgraet 1 hour ago

                I have explicitly stated more than once, beforehand, what would have given you a benefit of doubt from my perspective. Even after reading all that you opted for answer evasion, rather than providing any substance, as you do with all the questions addressed to you. I do understand why you had to do it here though, because the claims regarding AI and LLM you have made before are even more outlandish than what has been posted over the last 10 days and similarly without a single shred of proof.

        • kbelder 15 hours ago

          He may not be a shill, he may just be terribly and enthusiastically wrong. Lots of HN posters are.

morpheuskafka 1 day ago

> But it's not. Some FAANGs are doing amazing things with unlimited tokens

Giving someone unlimited access to a resources is not the same as directing or incentivizing them to use it for the sake of using it which is what the parent comment criticized.

As for the other FAANGs, Meta and Google have (not good but still) frontier models of their own, so they are very different from a company paying API costs per token.

SecretDreams 1 day ago

Show me some fang that have made nice outwards facing products through a fully embraced AI workflow?

AI is an accelerator that engineers should know and have access to, but it's not something that should have mandated usage and quotas around. It's also absolutely dangerous for young engineers and the like - it fundamentally denies you of the "learning" aspect. I'm now seeing in interviews young graduates being given AI tasks to complete and they come back with a correct solution and no concept of how it is working.

You learn and reinforce learning by DOING and reading in depth. High level summaries don't teach anything and are the kinds of things only VPs care about. So, unless the intention in the future is for everyone to be a VP using AI to do the work, we need some middle ground here and some real thought around implementation of these tools or there's going to be a generational canyon gap of knowledge between being able to "say" and being able to "do".