Churning out useful code quickly is not solved by using more tokens per unit time. Most non-technical leaders can grasp this one and are likely more interested in the strategic game theoretical dynamics that are being forced by way of implied token consumption expectations (competition between developers).
If you want to hold out as long as possible and don't really care about anything other than the compensation package, you should at least play along with this new game in a half-assed manner. Try to goldilocks your token usage between any established extremes. You want to be in the statistical barycenter of every AI report that management can create.
We may be on the cusp of the AI age's new era of 'measure twice, cut once'.
Where we were 6mo ago is that a lot of big orgs realized they were behind, and needed some way of measuring if the tools were usable at all.
No sawdust at all on your job site, and you can tell nobody is cutting wood.
Now that tooling is more mature, you can measure things like % of diffs AI-generated, % of AI suggestions accepted vs edited, % of KB queries successful etc - all more useful than raw token count for quantifying how your org is using the tool.
So it’s a pragmatic metric that got a bit Goodhearted.