Opinion ·
Agencies, beware: unchecked tokenmaxxing will drive away your best talent
Original title, in French: “Agences, attention, le tokenmaxxing débridé va faire partir vos meilleurs talents”
- Publication
- Journal du Net (France)
- Author
- Nicolas Moreau
- Published on
- 1 October 2026 · read in the page structured data
Summary
The article describes the phenomenon of "tokenmaxxing", an unchecked adoption of AI in companies that leads developers to produce large amounts of code with no real added value, at the expense of their working experience. According to the study The State of AI Impact 2026, 50% of code is now generated by AI, while employee experience deteriorates. A study by MIT and Wharton covering 100,000 GitHub developers shows that the use of AI agents increases commits by 180%, for only a 30% rise in actual production deployments. A survey of 860 Microsoft developers reveals their frustration at the mismatch between an accelerated pace of output and slow management. The author warns that companies that reward generated volume rather than professional judgement risk losing their best engineers to organisations that show more respect for their expertise.
Summary based on the full text of the article.
Read the article on Journal du Net →Figures cited
-
50 %
Share of code now generated by AI
software development teams, 2026
« 50% du code est maintenant généré par IA et plusieurs aspects de l'expérience collaborateur décline (The State of AI Impact 2026). »
Source: The State of AI Impact 2026
-
180 %
Increase in commits among developers using AI agents
100,000 active GitHub developers, MIT and Wharton study
« Les développeurs usant régulièrement d’agents pour coder font bondir les commits de +180%, bien au-delà des livraisons réelles puisque les mises en production sont de l’ordre de +30% seulement. »
Source: MIT et Wharton
-
30 %
Increase in actual production deployments
100,000 active GitHub developers, MIT and Wharton study
« Les développeurs usant régulièrement d’agents pour coder font bondir les commits de +180%, bien au-delà des livraisons réelles puisque les mises en production sont de l’ordre de +30% seulement. »
Source: MIT et Wharton
-
860 developers
Microsoft developers surveyed on AI use
internal Microsoft survey
« Interrogés directement, 860 développeurs Microsoft ont admis trouver de l'intérêt à l'IA pour toutes les tâches liées à la vérification, mais ne lui concède que peu de valeurs eu égard à l'architecture du produit, et de l’entreprise par extension. »
Source: Microsoft
Classification
- Country
- Worldwide scope
- Company size
- All sizes
- Industries
- Software vendors, IT services companies, telecoms
- Companies
- MIT (study author), Wharton (study author), GitHub (cited), Microsoft (cited)
- Keywords
- tokenmaxxing, developers, AI productivity, coding slop, talent attrition, employee experience
Entry written by Marsanne Studio from the cited article, with the help of an AI model (claude-sonnet-5). The rights to the article and its illustrations belong to Journal du Net and its author. Entry translated from French by Claude Sonnet 5.5.