The perils of tokenmaxxing: How to govern AI spend without sacrificing speed

I write about tech and AI for a living, but nothing has made me yearn for the Butlerian Jihad more than learning (against my will) about the term "tokenmaxxing." And if I have to know what that means, you do, too. In early 2026, companies started publishing internal leaderboards ranking employees by how many AI tokens they consumed. At Meta, the board was called "Claudeonomics," and it handed out digital badges with extremely not-dorky titles like "Cache Wizard" and "Model Connoisseur." The high