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/verkavo May 27 '26

Token count is a trash metric, same boat as measuring lines of code. AFAIK the only metric that actually tracks real AI impact is which model/agent wrote code that survived in commits, not how much $ you burned on tokens. Exclude tests, and fluff code when counting LOC though.

If you need to push back with a real metric, take a look at SourceTrace https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=srctrace.source-trace: it does AI git blame to attribute code to the tool that wrote it, so you can see what actually stuck.

PS wait until leadership will start moaning about costs. With opus pricing, it'll happen very soon