Cognition CEO Scott Wu has weighed in on the debate over tokenmaxxing, a practice where employees are ranked by their consumption of AI compute tokens. In a podcast interview released Sunday, Wu acknowledged the metric is useful in principle but warned it can lead to wasteful behavior when taken too literally.
Founded in 2023, Cognition is the San Francisco-based startup behind Devin, an autonomous AI coding tool. The company raised over $1 billion in May at a $26 billion valuation, with backing from Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures, and others. Wu cofounded the firm with Steven Hao and Walden Yan.
"People are like, 'We rank our engineers by how many tokens they're spending.' Well, let's try and rank people by how much output they're actually producing," Wu said on the "Founders" podcast. He argued that token usage is a "directionally correct" proxy but not a substitute for measuring real productivity.
The controversy has sparked debate among tech leaders over how best to incentivize AI adoption without encouraging waste. Some critics argue tokenmaxxing rewards volume over value, potentially driving up compute costs without corresponding gains in software quality.
Wu's remarks highlight a growing tension in the industry: companies want to encourage aggressive use of AI tools but must guard against metrics that distort behavior. The executive's comments suggest Cognition leans toward output-based evaluation rather than raw resource consumption.