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Tokenmaxxing is a new productivity metric, and it's making AI output worse. Inside the Slop KPI Era and the context bloat problem nobody's measuring.

On a recent episode of the All-In Podcast, Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA—a company with a market cap equivalent to that of 1.5 Frances, 4 Polands, or 12 Finlands—said this: "If that $500,000 engineer did not consume at least $250,000 worth of tokens, I am going to be deeply alarmed."

At Meta, a smaller company worth just 4 Finlands, engineers have begun the process of "Tokenmaxxing." They've even started a leaderboard to see who's burning the most tokens. This is because it is unequivocally true that the more tokens you use, the more productive you're being.

For this same reason, it is widely recognized by connoisseurs that Everclear Neutral Grain Alcohol—a digestif that comes in at 95% ABV and also works well as a hospital-grade antiseptic—is the superior alcoholic beverage. By comparison, a bottle of 1937 Domaine de la Romanee-Conti, a red wine that survived 89 years, including all of World War II, in a temperature-controlled cave in Southern France, comes in at just 13% ABV. That makes the Everclear over 7 times better than the chateau whatever-it's-called.

Linus Torvalds, a man from Finland who also made something called "Linux," may disagree that more equals better. In a conversation that we found on YouTube, he had this to say about those who measure the quality of their engineers by the number of lines of code (LoC) they've written: "Anybody who thinks that's a valid metric is too stupid to work at a tech company." Perhaps the Finnish man has a point.

Imagine you're an engineer at Meta. Does that mean you can just log into Claude Code, fire up the extended-thinking Opus model, and use it to transcribe Tolstoy's War and Peace in Hellenic Greek 80,000 times? Would that get you 61.6 billion tokens higher up the leaderboard than, say, the engineer in the next cubicle over—who actually paused to think about what they were doing that day?