https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/05/amazon-employees-are-tokenmaxxing-due-to-pressure-to-use-ai-tools/

Back in the .com days, I trained companies and developers to customize software for tracking and awarding sales compensations. The first lesson, salespeople were absolutely genius in figuring out how to game incentive systems. :-)

IT nerds are now saying hold my beer. Amazon mandates and monitors all their developers' use of AI.

• Management is tracking AI usage by how many AI tokens (e.g., number of "words" used with AI conversations) per developer.
• So developers cheat , and write AI agents to consume additional tokens (token maxxing).
• And dev management use this fake usage to show how well all their teams are in adopting AI.

Used to be number of lines of code written, now tokens used. :-)

Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

Way to go nerds.

That's it. I'm ordering dozens of these for my team. Ya know, just in case

So, don't buy rulers at a Target?