But using AI is all about cheating!
this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2026
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Why don't they start a new leaderboard for amount of tax paid in each country?
How come people with MBA studies are too dumb to see that easily cheated metrics, are easily cheated? What do they actually teach in those studies? Have 5 mission statements that are the exact opposite of how we actually act, and fire people do line go brrr? That's it?
Ironic that cheating the system is exactly what Amazon execs are doing all day every day.
Execs and management lie at every town hall but then act appaled if someone lies on their resume.
Because they can, of course. They get to hold those with the weaker position, to a higher standard. Partly why they are terrified of us being in the stronger position, they project their fear that we would treat them as they treat us.
"Claude, write me a recursive AI prompt, then execute it."
"I'll be leaving for the day. Notify me if anything changes."
Wouldn't even need that. Just give it a mid-way complicated pile of nonsense with reasoning on, and it'll be crunching on that for the whole day, burning money to do so.
Exactly what I said would happen.
Me smrt billionaire, me track token quantity. Dat look good. Use most tokens iz gud. Wat does kwalitee mean?
A friend of my worked at a company where they had metrics on Claude code usage and some employees just started multiple agents on the same project where one was tasked to implement a feature and the other was tasked to remove that same feature...
Reminds me of an old story where a pizza place held a competition among the employees, to see which cashier could convince the most people to upgrade their medium pizzas to a large. The POS system was set to track whenever a medium was upgraded, and would award the cashier one point. The employee with the most points each week won something like free movie tickets.
Employees would put on their best salesmen pitches, trying to get customers to upgrade their medium orders to larges. But one cashier always won, pretty much without exception. He was going to see a new movie every week for free. And he didn’t even seem to be trying.
His trick was that whenever a customer ordered a large, he would just put it in as a medium and then immediately upgrade it. It gave him the point for the upgrade, with zero actual sales effort on his part. So every time he had a customer order a large, he got a point by default. Customer ordered three large pizzas? Three points. He didn’t even bother trying to convince people to upgrade their pizza sizes, because the free points from every large order were already enough to let him win every week.
The neat thing is you don't even need AI for that!
Look mom, I found the infinite productivity glitch. Production hit infinity% thanks to copy pasta!
AI once again taking jobs from human workers smh
The idealized market was supposed to deliver ‘friction free’ exchanges, in which the desires of consumers would be met directly, without the need for intervention or mediation by regulatory agencies. Yet the drive to assess the performance of workers and to measure forms of labor which, by their nature, are resistant to quantification, has inevitably required additional layers of management and bureaucracy. What we have is not a direct comparison of workers’ performance or output, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance and output. Inevitably, a short-circuiting occurs, and work becomes geared towards the generation and massaging of representations rather than to the official goals of the work itself.
-- Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism
Or, to put it succinctly, that which gets measured gets done, and the people in charge of measuring don't know what's important.
And then, eventually realizing this, they hire consultants for $$$, who offer two things, further tips for goosing numbers in silly ways, and also just direct advice for how to treat employees like utter shit, with a sharp, stainless veneer of "smart (because $$$ spent) business strategy".
This hits so hard
If a metric becomes a target...
How many times do we have to teach you the same lesson, old man?
If a metric becomes a target, It ceases to be a good measure. If it ceases to be a good measure, It will want a glass of milk. If it wants a glass of milk, It will want a cookie. If it wants a cookie, It will need to become a target. If it needs to become a target, It will want to be a measure.
Hey I know that book!
I should probably spell it out, yeah.
It's my favourite counterbalance to certain managers at my company regurgitating a half-understood "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it" (which is also almost entirely bullshit, but MBAs need a one-size-fits-all solution in order for the whole premise of their degree to work, so they attempt to make businesses conform to their methods instead of adapting their methods to the business). You can't use a single measure (or only directly dependent measures), then tell people to improve that measure without figuring out just why it's lagging and working on that instead.
ctrl + f + goodhart
There it is 👍
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Oh no, did using stupid metrics backfire because people are smart enough to game the stupid metric?
C-suite smart
Whole concept of "how much AI you used", is so flipping stupid of a metric I can't even wrap my head around. I mean even if we assume it's their own AI they are using... that's their power etc... That's like a leaderboard for most gas used up, or miles driven by your truck drivers.
Like judging how good a driver is by the person with the longest distance a to b.
I mean I can say it's not quite as guaranteed to be bad. IE distance from A to B is inherently bad, Most distance driven COULD mean you made more stops and did more good.... or it could mean you took a horrible route, got lost and wound up crossing through the wrong state.
And here we have our employee of the year! He accidentally turned left instead of right, and ended up circumnavigating the entire globe. While most of you only use 2 miles to go from A to B, he used 24899. Isn’t that incredible?
or it could mean you took a horrible route, got lost and wound up crossing through the wrong state.
We don't need a map to guide us.
Should it be snowing?
Hey, I've never seen the sun come up in the West?!
I used 5 AI.
I used 2 AI before i used 2 AI, then i used 2 AI some more...
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My company is doing this too. Measuring this and PR counts.
What’s it about technical leadership and having no fucking clue how anything works?
Measuring this and PR counts.
Ah yes, the “I want to see 1000 lines of code, even if it only takes 50” type of manager.
A steadfast replacement of engineers in leadership with MBA’s over the last decade plus.
Money found a place in the tech chain and has since ruined it.
The further you get from the front lines the less you have a grasp on day to day operations, especially when the job changes. Double that for leaders that never held technical positions, and come from other areas that guide their view on things.
Then you have the power imbalance with a hierarchy, if someone is responsible for your job you are more likely to just say "yes" to bad ideas than push back on them. Even when a manager is receptive to feedback that doesn't mean the ICs are going to give the feedback, or they get demoralized when their ideas aren't taken for valid reasons.
Time to start with one PR per line of code…
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