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   Thayer (thayer@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 13-May-2026 17:59:41 JST Thayer

   RE: https://mastodon.online/@tomshardware/116561860722986272

   Have been talking about this with folks across tech product teams over the year, this is happening as standard in larger companies right now. Pretty crazy stuff. Reminds me of when sales folks make spurious calls just to get their call count up to hit targets.

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     scribe (scribe@mastodon.sdf.org)'s status on Wednesday, 13-May-2026 17:59:40 JST scribe

     in reply to

     • Adrian Howard

     @Thayer @adrianh Someone showed me the token usage dashboard for their (other large) company last week and I felt a bit sicky. Very sales centrey, intended to get staff to compete against each other, but with that nagging feeling that it's all just to train up the models even further and do away with them.

     All so f***ing short-sighted, inefficient, and dehumanising in my view. But hey, can't stop progress right?

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     scribe (scribe@mastodon.sdf.org)'s status on Wednesday, 13-May-2026 18:02:14 JST scribe

     in reply to

     • Adrian Howard

     . @Thayer @adrianh Seriously struggling to take a sensible line on all this right now. Experience, caution, art and craft of the industry seem to be being thrown under the bus. Plenty of people seem to hate it. But how much engagement with it is needed, or is enough? MVAI? Full craftspersonship?

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     Adrian Howard (adrianh@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 14-May-2026 01:55:48 JST Adrian Howard

     in reply to

     • scribe

     @scribe @Thayer The thing that weirds me out about the usage tracking thing is that it's the classic output over outcome mistake.

     Who gives a fig for how much stuff is used — what is the actual useful _impact_?

     It's worrying how many of my clients are dealing with orgs that don't have an answer to that question.

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     scribe (scribe@mastodon.sdf.org)'s status on Thursday, 14-May-2026 01:55:48 JST scribe

     in reply to

     • Adrian Howard

     @adrianh @Thayer For the big companies, the end game is definitely to drop humans altogether - at least Meta are up front about it: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/05/10/0545234/nyt-metas-embrace-of-ai-is-making-its-employees-miserable

     For everyone else, I guess it's a continuum between wanting to save money and not wanting to be left behind. Delivering faster, not better. Press releases are, as always, the only impact that matter... :-/