Burning tokens is equated with making progress. More conversations are treated as more "issues" handled. Coding sessions have changed into speccing, PRD, test plan, code plan, code generation and review pipelines. Only for every single piece of artifact to be double-checked by a human. This is considered "agentic engineering". And agentic engineers' token maxing is becoming the norm and is treated the same as "employee performance/efficiency".
It is like we've handed every engineer (and non-employee) uncapped credit, burning at dozens of dollars per minute. No one is talking about whether the costs are justified. No one accounts for the tokens (and money) spent. All for what feels more and more like busy work.
Am I the only one seeing this?
