‘Tokenmaxxing’ is making developers less productive than they think
TechCrunch AI Tim Fernholz April 17, 2026

AI Summary— plain English for professionals
# What You Need to Know About 'Tokenmaxxing' Developers are writing more code than ever by using AI tools, but they're actually wasting money and time because much of that code needs to be rewritten or fixed. The push to generate as much code as possible—what's called "tokenmaxxing"—creates a false sense of productivity that masks the real costs hiding underneath.
There's a lot more code — but it's a lot more expensive and requires a lot more rewriting.
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