Is Token Usage the New Lines of Code? How to Measure Developer Productivity in the AI Age
"Whatever gets measured gets gamed." — Goodhart's Law
An OpenAI engineer processed 210 billion tokens in a single week. A Claude Code user spent over $150,000 in a month. Salesforce quietly set a $175 minimum monthly token-spend target for engineers, and developers started asking AI to summarize documents they already understood, just to hit the number.
Welcome to tokenmaxxing. The newest chapter in software engineering's oldest and most embarrassing story: measuring the wrong thing, confidently, at scale.
This article will give you the unfiltered answer to a question every engineering leader and developer is quietly debating right now. Is measuring token usage the same as measuring lines of code? And if so, what should we actually be measuring?
