Meta removes AI token metric from engineer reviews due to tokenmaxxing

Meta has stopped including AI tool consumption in engineering reviews after employees started ‘tokenmaxxing’, i.e., increasing token usage with irrelevant queries to dominate the internal ranking. Meta’s total annual spending on AI is expected to reach billions of dollars by 2026. But the company won’t get centralized management tools and new funding until 2027. Instead, engineers will be evaluated based on the quality, efficiency, and difficulty of their work.

Tokenmaxxing revealed an inherent weakness in AI activity metrics. Token count is easy to manipulate and doesn’t tell you anything about the value created. If you track your “AI maturity” with token counts or activations, you’ll get high numbers but little return on investment.