No sawdust is bad. But it's also bad if you cut all your boards into sawdust. Completely. Obliterated. No useful output, only sawdust.

% of AI suggestions accepted vs. edited is also a BS metric that Anthropic et. al. like to push, similar to LoC, because they're large numbers and large numbers must be good, right?

Well guess what, I have auto-accept on and then adjust after it's "done". And I do it by telling it what changes to make and those have auto-accept on as well. That's quite a high "accept" rate, by definition. But in reality it may have churned on 50% of the lines it generated and auto-accepted first.

My feeling is it's not as bad of a metric as people think. Companies don't fully know the best way to use AI and things are changing rapidly, so you want people using a lot of tokens even on stuff that seems maybe kind of dumb on the surface, because if you find one useful thing and share it in the org that makes up for a lot of failures.

But I do think you also need to say, "To be clear, don't game the system. Any token usage that is even remotely justifiable as useful for the business is fine, and we will give you a lot of latitude. But if you're in the top 10% of token users, we are going to review your token usage, and if we find that you have a dozen agents perpetually running writing slam poetry, you're going to get fired."

> % of AI suggestions accepted vs edited

this has to be the worst metric.

anytime the llm wants me to read a diff of one file, im just gonna send it forward so i can read the whole diff

No sawdust means no tokens. Maybe there were already enough planks around. Maybe a task was completed without AI. What matters is what was done and not whether there's sawdust / AI was used.

It is not a pragmatic metric in any way. And they are not evaluating whether it is useful by maximizing spend tokens. You need to, well, evaluate various kind of uses to do that.

It is oddly unprecendeted economic behavior.