I was under the impression that the tokenmaxxing phenomenon was mostly propaganda from the hyperscalers and their vendors to keep the AI funding gravy train alive and prevent demand collapse from popping the bubble.

The big catastrope for valuations is if supply outruns demand. Videogen has not reached the expected traction and profitability, so now we're talking about 1000x code output as a success metric. But that's not quite the same thing as solving 1000x the number of user problems.

If anything these huge codebases are just creating new problems and atrophying from context rot due to the sheer amount of noise.

> I was under the impression that the tokenmaxxing phenomenon was mostly propaganda from the hyperscalers and their vendors to keep the AI funding gravy train alive and prevent demand collapse from popping the bubble.

It's not. A lot of companies who wouldn't otherwise be terribly exposed are getting in on it. The steelman argument for it is - if you think that the optimal software development strategy is going to be much different in 2027 than it was in 2025, and you have a lot of money to burn, it may well be worth having your devs go wild trying everything to see what works.

(Of course, that steelman is very compatible with a story where the best strategies don't end up using very many tokens and a bubble pop happens anyway.)