AI Build Traps: Usage, Output, and Outcomes (How perverse incentives around token usage create cobra farms)

Organizations frequently rely on proxy metrics like lines of code, tickets closed, PRs merged, and now AI token usage to measure developer productivity, but these create perverse incentives that drive counterproductive behaviors. The classic cobra problem illustrates how rewarding a proxy (dead cobras) led people to breed more cobras, worsening the original problem. Similarly, incentivizing AI token consumption encourages engineers to maximize usage regardless of actual output quality or efficiency gains.