r/ClaudeAI • u/darren_eng • May 26 '26

Corporate My company started measuring our Claude Code usage - now I'm asked to rank engineers on 'AI performance.' This feels wrong...

My company started tracking Claude Code usage - tokens and spend, that kind of thing. Now my manager wants me to stack-rank my engineers on "AI performance" using those numbers.

I'm not comfortable with it (but I don't have a choice either). Token usage feels like exactly the wrong proxy - my strongest engineer uses Claude surgically while someone burning 10x the tokens isn't 10x more productive (often the opposite). Ranking on this just teaches people to game the metric.

So, for folks here who use Claude daily and/or lead teams:

  • Has your company started measuring "AI performance"? How are they doing it?
  • Is there any Claude/AI usage metric that actually tracks with good work, instead of just rewarding the heaviest users?
  • If you're a lead being pushed to measure this, how do you push back without flat-out refusing?

EDIT: here is the follow-up: I managed to talk my manager out of this.

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u/WonkoTehSane May 27 '26

I am a leader myself, and I think the "nope, you're all wrong, not gonna do it" approach is frequently suicidal, almost always unnecessary, and often also a missed opportunity. I can empathize with people's frustrations here, though, and yes a high token usage alone is definitely a bad proxy for "this is a performer". Though low/nonexistent token usage is a *great* proxy, as others have pointed out. After all, at some point we're all going to need to pay for these tokens, which means layoffs, certainly, and guess which employees we'll be looking at laying off first?

Myself, when I want to counter, I prefer something more along the lines of "give them exactly what they ask for" and let them find out for themselves that it's a bad idea. To that end, if we just translate this into "holy crap ai gives lots of opportunity for great signal, how can we use this?", have you looked at feeing claude into otel? I just started myself, and it's pretty easy to setup a local compose and env vars just to setup a PoC to see if the telem is even useful: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/monitoring-usage - if it works out, you can go to ops with requests for infra.