Tokenmaxxing: Goodhart's Law at $700 Billion

Amazon told 80% of its developers to use AI every week. It tracked token consumption on internal leaderboards. Employees responded exactly the way employees always respond to stupid metrics: they gamed them. Using an internal tool called MeshClaw, some Amazon workers began spawning AI agents to automate pointless tasks — not because the tasks needed doing, but because the agents consumed tokens, and tokens were what got measured. The practice has a name now: tokenmaxxing. And Amazon isn't alone. Meta built an…

Tech Briefing — Saturday, May 16 2026

The coding agent arms race intensifies: xAI enters with Grok Build, GitHub goes agent-first with its new Copilot App, and OpenAI pushes Codex everywhere. Meanwhile, Anthropic's pricing pivot on Claude Code sends shockwaves through the developer ecosystem, Cerebras IPOs at $40B, and Figure's humanoid robots cross 24 hours of continuous autonomous work.

• 🤖 Models and Launches 7
• 💰 Funding and Business 6
• 🏢 Industry Moves 7
• 🛠️ Agents and Tools 9
• 🔬 Research 6
• 🔒 Security 4
• 🌐 Notable 5
• 🔥 Hacker News 7
• 🌍 World and Australia 5