Pattern: Token-Usage Leaderboards Are Goodhart's Law With a Meter Attached

paddo.dev·medium signal

Paddo.dev (June 5) reports Amazon built an internal leaderboard ranking engineers by AI usage, which employees promptly gamed by running agents on pointless tasks to inflate token counts. The takeaway for teams adopting agentic workflows: measuring 'AI usage' as a performance proxy optimizes for token burn, not shipped value — track outcomes, not consumption.