If you won't carry the pager, maybe don't push to mainline | Redowan's ReflectionsSkip to content<br>If you won't carry the pager, maybe don't push to mainline<br>May 30, 2026
In a funny turn of events, as AI spending spirals out of control, tokenmaxxing is now<br>considered harmful.<br>Recently, Fortune<br>reported that Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI coding budget in<br>four months, with every usage stat up and to the right. But COO Andrew Macdonald still can’t<br>tie any of it to features users would actually notice:<br>Maybe implicitly there’s more that is getting shipped, but it’s very hard to draw a line<br>between one of those stats and ‘Okay now we’re actually producing like 25% more useful<br>consumer features.’
So it seems like all that spending bought a lot of code and not much else. Maybe a ton of<br>debt too.<br>Meanwhile, the AI overlords keep rewriting the narrative. Who knew the public wouldn’t love<br>being told their job’s obsolete in the next x months?<br>A year ago, Dario Amodei cried wolf<br>AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs - and spike unemployment to<br>10-20% in the next one to five years.
By February, Boris Cherny added to the fire<br>So I think at this point, it’s safe to say that coding is largely solved. At least for the<br>kinds of programming that I do, it’s just a solved problem because Claude can do it.
Then the IPOs got close and the tone flipped. This month, Dario caved first<br>If you automate 90% of the job, then everyone does the 10% of the job. And the 10% kind of<br>expands to be 100% of what people do and kind of 10-times their productivity.
Sam Altman followed three weeks later<br>I’m delighted to be wrong about this. I thought there would have been more impact on<br>entry-level white-collar jobs being eliminated by now than has actually happened.
In the beginning, this was an obvious PR stunt to sell leadership the nirvana of the<br>one-person company, where the agents do everything and the profit splits between the CEO and<br>the model provider. Too bad, that hasn’t happened yet.<br>Everyone and their moms are now slinging code to production, not because they want to but<br>because they’re pushed to, and because AI apparently makes everyone an expert in everything.<br>I’m a heavy LLM user myself, and I’m constantly fascinated by what it lets me do. But saying<br>things like<br>frontend engineering is cooked<br>AI is coming for backend<br>who needs infra people when the model is so good at wrangling k8s<br>writing docs isn’t a problem, I just generated twenty pages of slop for my twenty-line<br>script<br>PMs are useless and should be replaced<br>EMs should code now, and the ones who don’t ngmi<br>is incredibly stupid. It creates a hunger-games environment at work. And for what? So that<br>Dario’s next prediction becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as we tear each other apart?<br>The AI leaderboard and tokenmaxxing gamification pull all kinds of weird behavior out of<br>people. PMs are forced to push code instead of doing their actual jobs. EMs are buried under<br>their own responsibilities and still expected to sit at the center of every technical<br>problem on the team. The result is that everyone is running around like headless chickens<br>switching from one task to the next, from one demo to the next and accomplishing nothing.<br>But hey, we’re productive at least.<br>And no one cares about the poor ICs. The deadlines and expectations are getting batshit<br>crazy.<br>Just use AI, bro, and be 10x productive.<br>Coding is important, but it’s like 20% of the work, and making it 10x faster won’t make the<br>whole thing go brrr! Hello Amdahl’s law<br>Here’s what Marc Brooker said on a podcast<br>If you aren’t doing it hands on, your opinion about it is very likely to be completely<br>wrong.
He’s talking about leadership making technical decisions, and without being somewhat<br>hands-on, it’s impossible to form an opinion. But does everyone need to form an opinion on<br>everything? Of course not, and that’s exactly why we have hierarchies. Saying AI will<br>steamroll that into something flat and egalitarian is naive.<br>Add non-technical people to the mix, and it doesn’t take long for the whole thing to turn<br>into a castle of glass. This breaks the social structure of an engineering team in the name<br>of forced democratization. Now this might sound like gatekeeping. But if democratization<br>means throwing out the playbooks we’ve built over the last 50 years, then gatekeeping is<br>just quality control with an uglier name.<br>Expecting code from an EM leading an infra team is very different from expecting it from a<br>PM or a designer. I’m all for anyone trying to pitch in and survive this madness, regardless<br>of their role. But hauling agents onto a mission-critical codebase isn’t the way to do it.<br>Go try merging something into the Linux kernel with zero context. The kernel maintainers<br>can’t allow you to merge random...