Why Tokenmaxxing is For Fools. A Rant on Fake Productivity.
Joe Reis
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Why Tokenmaxxing is For Fools. A Rant on Fake Productivity.<br>The Weekend Windup #31 - Cool reads, events, links, and more
Joe Reis<br>May 02, 2026
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There’s an intense FOMO I keep picking up, both online and offline: If you aren’t maxing out AI at every second and using the latest tools, you’re going to be left behind.<br>If you spend five minutes on social media or YouTube, you’re hit with a barrage of posts telling you that you need to be constantly on the bleeding edge of every new agent, model, and tool. Everything nowadays has to be maxed out. Clavicular popularized “maxxing,” which I think is a symptom of late-stage civilizational decline, but that’s another story. You’ve probably heard the term “tokenmaxxing.” It’s exactly as it sounds, and it’s all the rage. It’s cute in the way kids playing with gasoline and matches is cute, but I also think it’s for fools.<br>As I pointed out on a panel I was on earlier this week in San Francisco, instead of tokenmaxxing, I’m actually trying to tokenminimize and brainmaxx. This isn’t some attempt at hipster contrarianism, but rather an effort to strike a better balance between using AI effectively and doing deep cognitive work.<br>The AI Hamster Wheel of Fake Productivity
Right now, I have agent workflows running in the background of my business and my life. It’s awesome. When I code with AI and let agents run amok, I get incredibly fast iteration. This is great for experimentation and quickly proving out ideas. But if I’m being honest, there is a massive graveyard of projects that I’ve built this way. Either way, most of the stuff goes nowhere. Chatting with my friends, this is normal. You fire up Claude Code or Codex, give it an idea or some instructions, go off to do other things, and completely forget it’s even running until you come back. It’s fun, but I think superficially we are all moving really fast without asking: What are we actually building at the end of the day?<br>I was chatting with Tristan Handy, the CEO of dbt Labs, about this on a podcast yesterday (to be released in a week or so). We both agreed that a year from now, we’ll probably look back on this productivity theater and wonder what the hell we were doing.<br>We are burning ourselves out for the sake of fake productivity. It feels like you’re running faster, but you’re just on a treadmill. Or a hamster wheel. You can have an infinite number of AI agents acting as your employees, but if you’re a terrible manager of the Michael Scott variety, you’re just going to get out exactly what you put in.<br>Stepping Off the AI Hamster Wheel
I read and write a LOT. AI and screens are changing this for the worse, and my attention span is increasingly frayed due to lots of context switching. If I’m on my laptop, there’s always a tab to read, an app to use, or tokens to consume. I used to feel guilty if AI wasn’t constantly running in the background, cranking away at various tasks. It reminds me of how, in the pre-Lean manufacturing days, factories would run day and night because that was considered “productive” and “efficient.” Turns out, this convention was wrong, and Lean exposed the always-on factory as an expensive anti-pattern that was unproductive and inefficient. The same applies to humans. We’re not wired to be slaves to machines running 24/7.
To combat this, I’ve simplified. I posted recently about my travel setup for this San Francisco trip. It’s remarkably lightweight. I packed my reMarkable tablet, my phone, and a hardcover book. No laptop. Nothing else. It felt like a superpower. The nature of the work I do (the work that actually matters to me) requires deep cognitive cycles, not rapid-fire, shallow iterations.<br>That’s why I take my time when I write. I could easily use Claude to churn out a shitty, superficial book on data modeling, but why do that? If I did that, Mixed Model Arts would’ve been out, people would hate it, and I’d be known as a slop-author. Instead, why not dive deep into a topic, do something original, and build the thing that actually needs to exist in this world? The world doesn’t need more incremental or superficial solutions (I’m pitched these daily). We need to create what’s next. That requires deep work, and deep work takes real effort. It’s slow, gnarly, and antithetical to the hustle culture that makes you feel guilty if you’re not maxxing 24/7. At the same time, I haven’t seen very many maxxers who are seeing success. They’re just running faster on the AI Hamster Wheel. You’re fast bro, but you’re still on a hamster wheel.<br>Taking a step back, going for walks with just my Apple Watch (and often without it), and leaving my phone behind allow me to process problems...