Have a Coherent AI Policy

My very first job out of college was at a law firm with hundreds of paralegals. They were running an in-house workflow system to manage foreclosure and bankruptcy cases. I lucked into a boom industry when the housing bubble burst. At the peak, we were doing over 100K of each a year. The work was broken down into finely sliced tasks. Paralegals worked out of a queue of tasks, mostly of the same flavor. It was an assembly line for court filings; Taylorism brought to legal work. Before I started, a new executive had been brought in. One of her jobs was to streamline process. Her plan was simple: she was going to stand behind employees with a stopwatch and time how long it took them to complete tasks. KPIs would be set up based on those measurements. This went as well as you would expect. People don’t perform tasks the same way they normally do when an executive is standing behind them with a stopwatch. She quickly learned how worthless this was. All that is a segue to the latest garbage KPI in software engineering, tokenmaxxing, and the AI policy I wrote for my team. Tokenmaxxing is the latest fad to come out of management who still, in the Year of our Lord 2026, do not understand that every metric will be gamed. That executive with the stopwatch didn’t understand 20+ years ago and there are clearly leaders today who have not received the memo. The idea is that the company will encourage the adoption of AI tools by creating a leaderboard of who is using the most tokens. Much like any other naive metric , engineers immediately game it. Just create a loop that wastes tokens and shoot to the top of the leaderboard. Or waste just enough to show that you’re “using” AI, but not enough to explain your usage. This is what passes for leadership apparently. Creating easily gamed metrics for your team that are quickly divorced from actually helping people. Because at the end of the day, that’s what we’re here for, right? You’re here to help people, right? That’s what I’m here for. I’m here to help our customers accomplish their goals. I’m not here to use a certain number of tokens. Tokenmaxxing is a vanity metric masquerading as leadership. I manage a team that is very skeptical of AI, and for good reason. I don’t need to enumerate the ethical concerns here. There have been enough think pieces about that. I also don’t need to enumerate the productivity concerns. Depending on which way the wind blows and the position of Jupiter in the zodiac, your mileage will vary on how useful these tools are for you. You can find credible examples of anywhere from 0.1x -> 10x productivity depending on how you hold it. But what I am confident of is that the current generation of LLMs is causing the biggest upheaval in software engineering in my almost twenty year career. And as the manager of a team, it’s part of my job to have some position on that. So, after much discussion with the team, I quickly put together a guide describing our AI philosophy. Since putting this together, I’ve been surprised by how many developers I’ve spoken with who have no such document at work. The mandate is simply to AI as hard as possible and hope it all works. There is no mandate to use AI tools. You will not be reviewed based on how much you are using these tools. That being said, these tools are the largest upheaval our industry has seen in decades. Even if you are not using them on a daily basis, you are well served to be aware of how they are evolving. This space is moving so fast that your experience from six months ago is likely no longer relevant. A side effect of this large turnover in skills is that any expertise you didn’t gain six months ago is probably irrelevant today. Senior+ engineers are encouraged to use these tools in whatever way works best for them. That could be as an integral part of your daily workflow or just an occasional tool for proof of concepts for non-production code. There is an inherent contradiction in AI boosters. It cannot be true that I have to be an AI maximalist at this very moment and also that everything I know today will be worthless in six months. Why can’t I just wait until six months from now and use the better models and techniques? I won’t have to unlearn techniques that only exist to work around the immaturity of current tooling then. (I’m looking at you, Ralph Loops.) We hire smart people and we trust them to do the job. I don’t care what OS they use. I don’t care what editor they use. I don’t care what LSP they use. And I don’t care what AI tooling they use. I don’t care if they’re dipping their toe in for a prototype or if they’re running a full-blown Gas Town. I care that they’re delivering for our customers. But as the policy says, the upheaval is real. You do have a professional duty to try these tools on occasion. The tooling I tried in June 2025 is much worse than the tooling I came back to in January 2026. I expect the tooling I’m using in June 2026 to be even better. Any code gene

Have a Coherent AI Policy

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