Earlier this year a Meta employee built an internal leaderboard called “Claudeonomics” that ranked the company’s top 250 AI token users and handed out titles like “Token Legend” and “Cache Wizard.” It came down days after it leaked to the press. The word that stuck around was “tokenmaxxing”: treating how many tokens you burn as a proxy for how much AI is helping you.
I get why it caught on. Token counts are easy to measure, and they prove people are actually using the tools. But they measure the wrong thing. A token count tells you an agent ran. It doesn’t tell you whether anything got finished.
What I’m optimizing for instead
I build internal AI systems as an operator, and the question I keep coming back to is simple: did the work get done, and done right? That’s the shift I’d call evalmaxxing. Stop measuring how much the agent consumed and start measuring whether it completed the task correctly.
My working thesis is short. AI should finish work, and finished work has a metric and an owner.
A metric means you can say what “done” looks like before the agent starts. A ticket resolved, a record updated correctly, a handoff completed without a human redoing it. If you can’t write the eval, you don’t understand the job well enough to hand it to an agent yet.
An owner means a named person is accountable for what the agent did. Not “the AI team.” A person who gets the page when it breaks and who decides what the agent is allowed to touch.
Governance is how you get there
I’ve written before about why requests aren’t actors, and why the difference between enterprise agents and consumer slop is the governance layer, not the model. Evalmaxxing is the measurement side of that same idea. Staging, audit trails, and named owners are what make “done” checkable. Without them, all you can count is tokens.
Being part of a16z’s inaugural Ops Engineering Fellowship has me thinking about this from the operator’s seat. A token leaderboard is easy to build. A dashboard that shows which work an agent finished last week, how you know it was right, and who signed off is much harder. It’s also the only one worth having.
The takeaway
If you’re rolling out agents inside your company, try this. For every agent workflow, write down three things: what “done” means, how you’ll check it, and whose name is on it. If any of the three is blank, you’re tokenmaxxing.
