Cognition CEO Scott Wu said on an episode of the "Founders" podcast released on Sunday that token spend leaderboards are "directionally correct" but that "there are definitely some places where people have gotten carried away," advocating instead to "rank people by how much output they are actually producing." Cognition, founded in 2023 by Wu, Steven Hao, and Walden Yan, is valued at $26 billion and is best known for its AI coding tool Devin. Wu acknowledged that compute is expensive but stated that if engineers can "ship three times more than they would without AI, it is clearly worth it," adding that companies should tie rewards to specific outcomes like how many tickets are resolved. Wu is the latest tech leader to critique tokenmaxxing, following Jacob Lauritzen, CTO of legal AI startup Legora, who said on a podcast that rewarding token usage leads to people burning tokens "just to look good," and Andrew Feldman, CEO of Cerebras Systems, who called unlimited tokens "boneheaded from the get-go" and advised using lower-cost models.