I heard that tokens got cheaper, but the models now use more tokens to accomplish the same tasks.

Also, non-AI companies are widely halting tokenmaxxing, instead telling their work staff to use AI for the use-cases that work, and otherwise go back to human methods.

I also heard that engineers ordered to tokenmaxx (and given incentives to do so) would just prompt ridiculously difficult complex problems, and that would burn through and overrun company token budgets.

The metric is not the goal.