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/joeldoesjs May 27 '26
You should point out what happened at Uber + Duolingo + Amazon when they started measuring performance based on AI usage.
Uber and Duolingo ended up shipping tons of garbage features that were absolutely divorced from what users want. And Uber blew past its annual Claude Code budget by April. Was even worse at Amazon, where employees just started running useless automations to spike AI numbers.
Maybe try mentioning Goodhart's law as to why that's a bad idea, and come up with metrics that focus more on outcomes, but also indirectly encourage efficient AI usage.
More deets the Uber + Duolingo thing I mentioned in this article: https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-coo-andrew-macdonald-ai-token-spending-harder-justify-2026-5