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How AI is changing Software Engineering: A Conversation with Gergely Orosz, @pragmaticengineer
Takeaway
Tech giants are measuring engineers by AI token spend, recreating the discredited lines-of-code metric and warping behavior even as the underlying productivity gains are real.
Summary
- Gergely Orosz reports widespread 'token-maxing' at Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce, IGN — internal leaderboards or minimum spend targets ($175/month at Salesforce) push engineers to inflate AI token usage.
- Token counts now appear (as one signal among many) in Meta performance reviews; low usage gets weaponized against low performers, prompting absurd behavior like running autonomous agents to generate junk.
- Compares it to the discredited 'lines of code' productivity metric — Goodhart's law in action — and notes Meta killed its leaderboard after public embarrassment.
- Still net-positive: AI is making engineers measurably faster, but the cultural side effects of bad metrics are real and ridiculous.
developer-productivitymetricsai-coding
Original description
Gergely Orosz is a formar Uber and Skyscanner engineer and is the author of https://www.engguidebook.com/ and https://www.pragmaticengineer.com/ , the #1 software/AI engineering newsletter on Substack, built from scratch in Amsterdam but read by millions around the world. Speaker info: - https://x.com/GergelyOrosz - https://nl.linkedin.com/company/the-pragmatic-engineer Timestamps: 0:00 What is token maxing? 5:27 Is AI-driven productivity worth the hype? 12:42 How the role of the software engineer is changing 14:45 Are engineers now engineering managers for AI? 17:31 Large tech infrastructure and internal AI tooling 20:41 Why companies like Shopify invest heavily in AI churn 22:56 Growing The Pragmatic Engineer and finding product-market fit