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Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks
- HyperL0gi 4mo ago“Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.” ― Charlie Munger
- AMerrit 4mo agoI've done similar at my job where management wants us to use all of our tokens before they expire. I usually set it to documentation tasks and other minor tasks just to eat up tokens.
- rtkwe 4mo agoAt least that nominally creates some value at the end of the day. Documentation is the thing everyone wants but no one has time/desire to create. My most recent token heavy task was having an agent write unit tests for coverage on a little graphAPI tool I'd written a bit ago to satisfy SonarQube.
- sheept 4mo agoPeople don't want to read LLM-generated docs though. It'll lack the context to justify why things were designed the way they were, and there's always a risk of hallucination so you still have to verify the documentation's claims, since the person who published it likely did not scrutinize it.
- shigawire 4mo agoIf you have artifacts saved as you develop it can use those when writing docs to capture intent and design decisions.
- rtkwe 4mo agoThere's two major types of documentation "why is this like this" documentation and then there's "here's the features of this library/tool" documentation. LLM stuff is fine for the latter as long as you screen it for hallucinations. Your right the former they can't really do because they don't have access to the reasoning but I've often found even the latter to be lacking in many teams.
- andrekandre 4mo ago> LLM stuff is fine for the latter as long as you screen it for hallucinations that is such a productivity black-hole tho; at that point i might as well have written it myself
- rtkwe 4mo agoIMO that's down to how you personally feel about the two sides of the process. For me the initial writing is super tedious and I've never gotten great at the voice of technical documentation but checking it for errors and correcting that is easy.
- overfeed 4mo agoInaccurate documentation can be worse than no documentation at all!
- rtkwe 4mo ago...Yes. I didn't say fire and forget but it can handle a lot of rote recitation of library flags and functions perfectly well. The kind of stuff that's autogenerated with javadocs, inputs, outputs and effects that are all in the code are available to the LLMs. Like all things with LLMs generate and review but I've seen some good outputs with minimal errors that saved days of work no one was going to be given the time to do.
- funimpoded 4mo agoThere's really no end to dot-language diagrams you can have it make. Call graphs, package dependency maps, let it try to figure out an architecture diagram, whatever.
- gdulli 4mo agoGiving it busywork that you don't have the time or wherewithal to check carefully sounds like a disaster. Rather than introduce content that will be partially wrong and cause confusion if it's ever read, I'd consume the credits and send the output to /dev/null.
- funimpoded 4mo agoJust title it "draft". Odds are nobody will look at it anyway. Add a pre-commit hook to re-create the diagrams on every commit (in case anything changed, of course), that way you can really burn tokens and look good to management.
- spprashant 4mo agoGood old Goodhart's law. https://xkcd.com/2899/ https://xkcd.com/2899/
- rvz 4mo agoWhen a measure becomes a target....
- SoftTalker 4mo agoEspecially a measure that's so easily manipulated.
- smitty1e 4mo agoI was just going to invoke Goodhart's Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law
- manesioz 4mo agoToken-driven development
- onion2k 4mo agoI'd bet that the goal is for people to 'game' it though. By pushing people to use AI more they'll try it, experiment with it, 'waste' time on it ... and from that they'll learn about it. That's the end goal. They're using tokens for pointless stuff right now in order to figure out use cases where it helps. You can't do that without also learning where it doesn't help. My company is doing the same thing.
- this_user 4mo agoThat is exactly the point. It may be wasteful, but it's the fastest way to explore how AI may actually be useful to your business. Even if 80% of employees are just wasting tokens, you still have 20% who are figuring it out.
- jordanb 4mo agoEven if that were true it'd mean that current AI usage is overshooting actual, productive use by 5x. This is a problem when all the AI projections are that the current state is the minimum and future usage will be 10+x.
- onion2k 4mo agoIt does mean that, but in a situation where people don't know what the productive use is you have no other option. It's like that famous quote about advertising that says "Half my ad spend is wasted, but I don't know which half". 20% of token use is useful, but as you don't know which 20% it is you have to spend 5x more to get that knowledge.
- mrbungie 4mo agoIt is difficult to believe that you can cobra effect yourself into greatness. I'd rather say the most useful perk for companies doing this is the AI-washing adoption metrics they can report, which will hopefully (for them) increase valuations.
- nitwit005 4mo agoThat would be 20% who _might_ figure it out. That's essentially R&D spend, which has no guarantee of success.
- MrCharismatist 4mo agoLike six months ago we got a presentation from an AWS guy on the AI tooling available and how it fit with our particular use cases. At one point seemingly out of nowhere he pointed out on his screen share "Look at how many tokens I've used this month. I run so much Opus." It was a number that was offensively large. I remember thinking "That's a really odd flex, this crap is so expensive the fact that you use so much should be a red flag" He demonstrated a number of Claude Code use cases he had to manage and tweak AWS infrastructure that made me, the old greybeard sysadmin older than the internet think "You've used AI to do something that was a single command." So this story makes sense. They were being encouraged to just blast away at it six plus months ago.
- funimpoded 4mo agoI notice a lot of Cursor's suggestions are just stuff a linter should auto-fix. But if you hit "tab" it'll claim that as an AI-edited line, LOL. (A lot of the rest of it is stuff I could already have been doing just as fast if I'd ever bothered to learn to use multiple cursors, learned vim navigation, or set up some macros—I never did because my getting-code-on-the-screen speed without those has never been slow enough to hold anything up, in practice)
- jjice 4mo agoCursor absolutely tries to maximize what they claim is "AI-edited" and it's nonsense a lot of the time. If it writes a function and then I got in and edit that function, it claims my edits _and_ any net-new lines I add above or below the function.
- giancarlostoro 4mo agoSo their diff mechanism is poorly labeled (or purposely?) then.
- pwillia7 4mo agoyou don't use vim/emacs for the productivity. It's a lifestyle decision
- 421986 4mo agoNew proposed corporate slogan: "Tokens must roll for victory!" The original (third reich): "Wheels must roll for victory!" It will end in the same manner.
- anthonj 4mo agoLet it write unit tests for every single function in the codebase lol I've chosen the wrong profession.
- mandeepj 4mo agoBeing an investor in Anthropic, Amazon must have a preferred billing rate, but others do not. No wonder their revenue shot up so much, so fast, because of BS goals like those.
- grtt21 4mo agoAdvanced Circular flows If I own part of a company, and I spend money on their goods, and a result their revenues climb and consequently my valuation does too - then my firm value will be higher. This would also explain the gung-ho approach. Some pretty devious financial engineering akin to arbitrage
- ryandrake 4mo agoNot just Amazon, too. It feels like all of big tech (and some smaller firms) have simultaneously gone insane. Imagine if your CEO woke up one day and told the company: "We need to encourage travel spending. Please book as many business trips as you can, and spend as much money as possible. Fly first class to our satellite offices! Take limos instead of Ubers! Eat at fine restaurants! Make sure you are constantly traveling. In fact, we are going to make Travel Spending part of your annual performance review: If you don't spend enough on business travel, you'll get a low rating!" We are living in a totally bonkers time.
- MrBuddyCasino 4mo agoPeople think we’re living in oh so capitalist times, why then does everything smell soviet.
- sph 4mo agoHorseshoe theory
- almost_usual 4mo agoIt’s preposterous, companies are blindly funding slop and the product is fool’s gold.
- brewdad 4mo agoIt's the state of modern capitalism. Money must flow from one entity to another even if nothing of tangible value is produced. The flows of money prove the growth of both businesses.
- sznio 4mo agowhat kind of metric should we use to filter out that bullshit? dollarhours?
- uuyy 4mo agoIf I spend money on tokens but my revenue doesn't increase, nor do I get any operating efficiency gains - where is my growth then buddy boyo? The growth in revenue's (since earnings are negative for them) only shows up for the model producer
- rambojohnson 4mo agoI have colleagues at prime video who consult AI the way medieval clerks once consulted omens, generating entire chains of speculative labor after ritual examinations of any of their given codebases. no real or new initiatives / innovations are being pushed forward, and thats rumored to be happening in other departments as well.
- blindriver 4mo agoThis is what I do. I tell AI to go through every file in my project, identify up to 10 bugs per file, and then write the markdown with the name of the file plus "bugfix". This takes about 2 hours. Then I delete all the files with the suffix "bugfix" and then do it again.
- drivingmenuts 4mo agoYou should probably create an agent to make agents whose jobs are to figure out how to maximize the token usage (and one whose job is to calculate the minimum token usage, so it doesn't look like a boondoggle).
- brightball 4mo agoGoodhart's Law in effect right there.
- pjc50 4mo agoLots of people reporting their "I had to use up my tokens, so I burned them on worthless stuff" stories. Incredible thing to do in a climate emergency. Push harder guys, maybe we can hit 3C warming? This reminds me of the story of how the USSR nearly made whales extinct to meet a quota for whale meat that nobody wanted to eat.
- lmkg 4mo agoThis is why we're clear-cutting forests to build new data centers? Not even for "real" productivity gains, but just for the sake of using the tokens.
- Lord-Jobo 4mo agoBullshit work has hit escape velocity, won’t be long now before we have huge warehouses filled with people doing sudoku for their daily food allowance, and that’s just how our entire economy functions. How are we sliding face first into “snowpiercer but dumber”?
- buellerbueller 4mo agoGotta scale and then IPO those startups, so the VCs can cash out profitably.
- andrekandre 4mo ago> just for the sake of using the tokens capital requires growth, forests be damned
- danaw 4mo agodon't worry they're not building many of them anyways, they're just accumulating debt and padding the pockets of all the construction companies that are sitting around idle
- wolvoleo 4mo agoYeah but what can we do. I don't want to be punished by work either. Luckily I work in app management and I know they can only see the last date used so if I just put in one query per day I'm good. But I'm so sick and tired of this AI hype :(
- nateglims 4mo agoWithin Amazon, token usage is gamified if you use Kiro and your team isn't billed for it in the same way you are billed for AWS or have to account for your capacity in older systems. I've credibly heard of people gaming this internal ranking before anyone paid attention to it. There are also tons of enthusiasts doing all kinds of internal projects and sharing them. There's definitely some pressure from managers when they hear about N00% productivity boosts in internal presentations, but where I am at they would figure out if you were making up tasks rather than working pretty quickly and the pressure comes from aggressive deadlines and a shift from the yearly OP1 process to a more agile one.
- par 4mo agoNarrator: “it wasn’t just Amazon”
- mjr00 4mo agoI've heard similar stories from AWS and other non-AWS FAANG employees. All of the token leaderboards have a "this doesn't count toward your performance review" disclaimer, but there's an implied nudge nudge, wink wink after that statement. One person I've talked to has someone in their org who is running GasTown and chews through tokens 24/7. They don't contribute very much, but they're comfortably in the #1 spot.
- MeetingsBrowser 4mo agoI have heard from multiple people at smaller to medium sized orgs where token usage and AI adoption are a central part of performance reviews.
- ekjhgkejhgk 4mo agoYeah my manager at my 400 people company is one of those. He runs gas town and his agents bump things here and there throughout the codebase and he has like 50 commits a day. Compat versions, formatting, stuff like that. But the thing is, the problem is the person, not the technology. He was already like this before LLMs. He would "refactor" repos into smaller repos, and all of a sudden all of the code has his name. If you just skim, it looks like he build a huge chunk of the codebase in the company. He also has a history of saying no to stuff I want to do, then he does it himself. Also nitpick my PRs to no end (or straight says he doesn't think he should do that thing) and then he turns around and implements it himself. He doesn't copy paste my code, but he does re-implement himself the same ideas that he just said no to after my PR was open. Very smart guy, very dishonest. But he's good at being dishonest. If you ask him about it he says "oh I just though that this way would be more organized" or something like that. From the outside you could make the argument that one way is better than the other (for reasons I would claim are irrelevant), so it's not obvious that he's being dishonest. But since I see 100% of what he does, it's entirely clear to me that this is a pattern. EDIT: just remembered another one. One time I asked him to take a specific week of holidays. He didnt say "no" but he did mention that we're under a lot of pressure to deliver The Thing, and if I would delay my holidays. I said "No, I'm not going to delay them", so he approved it. Then when the time came around, he took holidays in the same week. On this one I didn't challenge him, I already know him well enough to know the truth which is he's no ashamed to ask from others things that he would never himself accept.
- kittikitti 4mo agoThere are some secret random seeds that will prevent the end token and just keep generating forever. This will ruin your hardware though.
- wolvoleo 4mo agoThis is coming to my workplace too. They send us angry reminders if we don't use copilot in ms office every day :( I just type Hello to it.
- almost_usual 4mo agoCorporate tech has accelerated into a preposterous trajectory. Burn resources at all costs to appear productive and use proxy metrics to measure success. Fire productive employees to ensure we have resources to fund the proxy metrics. AI slop fool’s gold is the product.
- andrekandre 4mo ago> AI slop fool’s gold is the product. juniors who are stuck on ai and cant learn is the real product imo
- netdevphoenix 4mo agoHasn't Anthropic being experiencing issues due to extremely high usage? Being their investor, you would think Amazon wouldn't do Anthropic dirty by weakening their ability to handle user traffic
- nateglims 4mo agoAmazon runs anthropic models in it's own DCs with Bedrock.
- brcmthrowaway 4mo agoHow does this work? Anthropic sends .gguf and a claude-serve binary?
- svachalek 4mo agoGGUF is mostly a hobbyist format, but yeah I'd assume it's a big pile of tensors and and executable.
- mattas 4mo agoWaiting for the YC startup in the next batch that provides tokenmaxxing-as-a-service.
- shriek 4mo agoWhen are they going to admit that they over invested in AI and somehow have to justify that spend with usage down our throat?
- whynotmaybe 4mo agoJust like return-to-office is there to maintain real estate value.
- swader999 4mo agoPeople need to start yelling, throwing things and publicly mocking execs that do this. What is wrong with you all? I do this (except the throwing) and I get nothing but respect. If you've been a good little soldier for years, done nothing but deliver and then you raise your ire people will listen. If you can't change your company, change your company!
- monkaiju 4mo agoSimilar situation here! In fact our team has a no-LLM policy that I'm quite happy with. We did experiment with it, to the point that one of our seniors atrophied so badly we had to let him go, and we're still paying down some of the slop residue...
- untrust 4mo ago> to the point that one of our seniors atrophied so badly we had to let him go What was the time scale here? Was it actual skill atrophy or were they just shipping slop PRs all the time
- monkaiju 4mo agoAbout a year. They were making slop, then when asked to work without AI were unable to be effective for months.
- buellerbueller 4mo agoThis seems like AI is the new ponzi scheme.
- tyleo 4mo agoThis is foolish. High token use is associated with worse output. If you fill your models context you are going to be using a lot more context but the labs literally put out charts of how the models degrade at high context use. This is analogous to measuring productivity by LoC output.
- drivingmenuts 4mo ago> This is analogous to measuring productivity by LoC output True, but it looks like productivity to people whose own productivity is measured by how busy their subordinates appear to be.
- Insanity 4mo agoHigh token usage does not mean high token usage in the same session / context window. But yeah, context rot hits hard, I find that with Codex/GPT5.4 after about 50% context window usage it's hard to get anything useful out of it on a moderately sized codebase.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4mo agoUse Vim or you're fired!
- d_philla 4mo agothis one is legit the right call, though
- noworriesnate 4mo agoBut how would you compete when people inevitably started mandating superior editors such as emacs[1] or even notepad[2]? [1] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/ https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Notepad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Notepad
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- saltcured 4mo agoHell, I'd resign. But, I can't figure out how to put my job back into command mode :-(
- laweijfmvo 4mo agoI work at a FAANG (not Amazon), and have heard this a lot, both internally and publicly. Except, never officially from anyone that mattered (leadership). It always starts with a rumor and/or someone (internal) creating a dashboard/metric, and blows up from there. I've even heard leaders proclaim that it's NOT what they're looking at, and that you better NOT be wasting those expensive tokens. Now, they might be; they've certainly used silly metrics in the past (LoC, commit count, etc.) without ever fully acknowledging it. But I don't believe that it's as simple as more tokens = more better.
- wolvoleo 4mo agoIn our place it is really a thing and comes from leadership. They feel like they spent a lot on copilot and they want to see people using it.
- wahnfrieden 4mo agoIt's too bad that they go with a safe enterprise option that is so deficient that the outcomes will be bad and lots of people will learn useless lessons that don't translate to state of the art tools and usage patterns
- ecshafer 4mo agoI tried to have copilot create a powerpoint slide with some content and a rough design idea. It created an empty powerpoint slide with the default template, told me to download it, then created a separate bit of text and told me to copy and paste it in (random bullet point nonsense), no design elements. Whereas claude actually created a slide, with color and formatting, and the content was generated and fit it. Copilot feels like Chatgpt 3.0
- wolvoleo 4mo agoYes the PowerPoint generation was one shot only, it would let you make one and then if you wanted to make changes it would tell you to do it yourself lolllll. I mean what's the point then. The only option was to roll a whole fresh try. Not sure if this is still the case, I rarely use PowerPoint.
- gofreddygo 4mo agoLong live Goodhart!
- Qem 4mo agoIt's a shame AI now has a universal basic jobs[1] program, but humans still not. Companies are paying AI to dig holes, so other AI can fill them. [1] https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-full-employment/ https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-full-employment/
- philipallstar 4mo agoWe didn't. The USSR had 100% employment long ago[0], and all the poverty that goes with it. This isn't like that, as it isn't funded through taxes. This is private companies experimenting with their money, and risking downstream cost increases that may cause people to go elsewhere, as they do when they try anything new. This is much better than just funding people regardless of productivity through forced taxes. [0] https://nintil.com/the-soviet-union-achieving-full-employment https://nintil.com/the-soviet-union-achieving-full-employmen...
- Qem 4mo ago> We didn't. The USSR had 100% employment long ago[0], and all the poverty that goes with it. I don't think USSR poverty rates surpassed those of Tsarist Russia that preceded them. To their credit, I think ideologic competition between capitalist and communist blocks was part of what allowed improvement of life conditions of workers in capitalist countries, after WWII. Fear of revolutions avoided one-percenters taking all productivity gains in the period. They had to share some to keep guillotines away. As soon as things went south in the USSR, from the 70s onwards, and capitalism took over the whole world, lacking any sort of viable extant competition, we reverted back to the old norm, the workers were denied their share of the productivity gains since then, and here are us now. A regime premised on free competition was undermined by lack of competition to itself.
- philipallstar 4mo agoNo, the ideas of individual liberty, law enforcement, and private property meant that central planners couldn't mess up the US. That's all you need to massively raise standards of living. That and energy from oil.
- jknoepfler 4mo agoIf GDP is going up, we must be wealthier and more productive, right? Surely? (/s)
- throwmeaway876 4mo agoWhat's the root cause of these ridiculous decisions being taken at tech corporations? Constantly, they fall into fads like these that everyone with a brain knows make no sense but still many companies decide to follow them. For example: RTO -> what's the point of this shit? we never knew for sure but higher ups at most tech companies suddenly decided that RTO was the way to go forward despite all the downsides. Another example: DEI policies, some of them were very non-sensical. I believe there has to be some downward pressure on these executives to take these decisions but I would like to know where it's coming from exactly and what's the logic behind them. Is it some big institution like Blackrock which has leverage on many of these companies? That's always been my bet but I never knew for sure.
- pyrolistical 4mo agoCrappy managers don’t know (or actively avoid) how to measure business value from individuals. So they need you to be in the office so they can physically see if you are putting in the effort. Tokens is just yet another proxy for business value. The problem they face is if everybody is judge by business value in dollars, crappy managers are the first to go
- Serhii-Set 4mo ago[dead]
- devmor 4mo agoI don’t even understand the point of making up tasks. Surely there’s some moonshot frustration project in your workday you could have an agent plugging away at, even if it’s unsuccessful.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- delbronski 4mo agoThis is what happens when you can code faster than you can think. It’s kind of similar to a Facebook hiring 100s of engineers before it even knows what to do with them.
- freakynit 4mo ago"When a metric becomes the target, it ceases to be a good measure".
- arian_ 4mo agoyesterday's front page: AI is making me dumb. today's front page: employees are making AI dumb. the circle is complete.
- jorblumesea 4mo agoHas anyone actually seen true business lift from agents or is this one of those "do stupid things faster" situation?
- 121789 4mo agoI think it's mixed. I have seen people with really good use cases and the opposite. It feels like the AWS/GCP situation all over again. Step 1: "this is amazing tech we need to leverage it immediately, use it as much as you can" Step 2: "oh shit this is getting expensive and I'm not sure of the ROI". We are approaching step 2
- untrust 4mo ago[dead]
- xyzal 4mo agoLove it. This needs to become a new trend, and price per token can't rise soon enough.
- paulorlando 4mo agoThe Casual form of Goodhart's Law... https://unintendedconsequenc.es/new-morality-of-attainment-goodharts-law/ https://unintendedconsequenc.es/new-morality-of-attainment-g...
- throwatdem12311 4mo agoWhen your incentive is to tokenmaxx don’t be suprised when people game the system. Measurements something somethjng benchmark something something bad.
- avelis 4mo agoGoodharts Law - When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. https://lawsofsoftwareengineering.com/laws/goodharts-law/ https://lawsofsoftwareengineering.com/laws/goodharts-law/
- MeetingsBrowser 4mo agoBut does Goodhearts law apply to things that were never a good measure to start with :)
- chris_engel 4mo agoI dont know... this works out until someone approaches you and says: well we see you are using LOTS of tokens so you must be incredibly productive. Please show your results.
- Macha 4mo agoThe type of leadership judging employee performance by token burn are usually doing it because they don’t have a clue how to judge performance so they’re just taking what they read on linkedin or their local cto roundtable about more AI = more better and turning it into a metric on the thing that makes a simple number.
- whoneedstokens 4mo agoMade this as a joke but maybe it'll get some use https://token-burner.pages.dev/ https://token-burner.pages.dev/
- dhruvrrp 4mo agoI work at AWS (disclaimer opinions are my own, do not reflect views of my employer) and i think the existence of a leaderboard has led to folks gamifying it. People see peers in a higher tier on the leaderboard and start burning tokens to catch up. I think the company realizes this and is actively trying to avoid this, since for the new tools there isn't a leaderboard.
- stefan_ 4mo agoRight, the leaderboard is internal.
- bravetraveler 4mo agoI'd do this if the other punch to follow didn't appear to be 'justify the expenditure'. Choosing to wait for the PIP instead, if $EMPLOYER goes this way. Tell me the work I'm not doing and how pieces of ~~flair~~, sorry, tokens might help. Or don't, I don't care.
- MeetingsBrowser 4mo agoAnecdotal, but appears to be common among other comments in the thread. For companies doing this there is no 'justify the expenditure'. Employees are being praised for high expenditure, regardless of actual outcome. Leadership see the problem as 'people resisting AI'. Embracing AI is seen as the solution, and token usage is seen as the measure of success.
- bravetraveler 4mo agoYou're right; the justification is made by dancing. Meme moment... weird flex, but okay. I'm also hesitant to 'go for the gold' because it only means more B2B monopoly money, juiced stats, or expectation. Or, God forbid, become the resident Token Expert. That praise you mention is exactly what I don't want!
- krupan 4mo agoSo we've seen sellers of AI hardware invest in AI software companies to create demand for their hardware. Now we are seeing AI (and/or AI adjacent) companies requiring their employees to use AI to create demand for AI. When does this snake finish eating its own tail?
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- general1465 4mo agoVicious cycle right here. Making up tasks to burn tokens -> Hey people love to use AI -> More data centers built -> You now have to make up more tasks to burn more tokens.
- shmerl 4mo agoDumb bureaucracy with dumb requirements will be met with corresponding response.
- AvAn12 4mo ago1. so is everyone who is subject to a corporate mandate... but... 2. this may be ok. A good way to learn a piece of software or tool or process is to play with it. We learn lots of general knowledge through play and experimentation. Heck we get better at musical instruments by playing on them. Mandates are kind of dumb in many ways. But they will force the issue of discovering whether anything useful can come from AI other than coding.
- mactavish88 4mo agoPlay stupid games, win stupid prizes.
- anigbrowl 4mo agoMaybe they could devote some resources to updating Amazon's customer facing AI instead. I ordered some programming books last night, and was told they'd arrive tomorrow (I'm a prime member and live near a major hub so this is the norm). This morning I found the date had been pushed back to May 27, a very surprising outcome (these were popular books from O'Reilly and similarly high volume publishers, not some obscure imprint). I asked Alexa (on the amazon web page) about it and it couldn't tell me which carrier had the items or why they were delayed, directed me to a non-existent phone number and then denied it had done so. The customer service bot I was eventually redirected to was even worse, and started telling my that items would be delivered both tomorrow and by May 27 in the same message. Finally I got human intervention, who said the items would arrive tomorrow and that the delivery status had been updated, but the order page still says they're arriving at the end of next week.
- xiaoyu2006 4mo ago> Amazon employees are reportedly using the company’s new internal AI tool, MeshClaw, to create extraneous AI agents—not to increase productivity, but to drive up AI activity. Every time I see "not... but..." I suspect an AI article. Not sure if this is the case here.
- graphememes 4mo agocan't come home today babe im tokenmaxxing
- dtnewman 4mo agoThis article inspired me to build "Burn, baby burn", a CLI tool for burning tokens. See: - Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48151287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48151287 - github: https://github.com/dtnewman/burn-baby-burn https://github.com/dtnewman/burn-baby-burn
- linsomniac 4mo agoCounterpoint: I've been "burning" a lot of tokens for the past year running experiments, not all of which have come to fruition. For example, I used around 15 hours of API-equivalent use building a DocuSign-like service which we arently likely to deploy to users. However, those experiments have definitely educated me on what and where and how to use the tooling. Like I tell my kids: If every experiment you do succeeds, you aren't trying hard enough.
- cmiles8 4mo agoIt’s not surprising given Amazon’s pretty lackluster position in AI beyond providing raw compute, which itself is basically a commodity at this point. Have heard very similar stories to what the article describes. There were also outright revolts from tech folks being forced to use Amazon’s own shit self-built AI vs Claude Code and other top-tier products. Given Amazon’s early start with Echo and Alexa they should have absolutely dominated this AI revolution but have been scrambling in a panic ever since ChatGPT showed up on scene and always seem two steps behind the market. It all paints a picture inside Amazon of clueless leaders at the top and mobs of others below them just gaming the system so a silly dashboard looks green. “Day 2” has arrived.
- Schiendelman 4mo agoThe "Amazon's early start" really reminds me of what the hybrid-focused Japanese car manufacturers did - they knew the battery tech and squandered their lead. This is normal though, this is why disruption is necessary.
- Insanity 4mo agoDevil's advocate - this is a forcing function to get people to try out AI whom might be reluctant to try it. I'm speaking from personal experience, I was 'forced' to use the tools as it is being tracked, and found genuine use-cases. Of course at some point the 'benefit' is outweighted by the 'negatives', e.g people making up work. Tokens used is about as useful a measure of productivity as 'hours in office'. EDIT: My use-case still have relatively low token usage though lol
- rafram 4mo ago> Unlike other AI models, OpenClaw and MeshClaw run locally on users’ own hardware, giving them unprecedented independence. No, they don’t.
- habosa 4mo agoThey invented a product that has no possible cost control: you don't know how much you've used until you've used it. And then we somehow made it a virtue to use as much as possible. I can't think of a more effective money printing factory. I wonder when we'll see our first "My startup went bankrupt on AI use" post. Amazon is being dumb but at least they can afford it.
- giancarlostoro 4mo agoHere I am wishing my employer would give me any AI modestly. I do more in my time off, with higher quality (in terms of how much I build, I don't like to just spit out features mindlessly and endlessly) due to the ability to plan things out more, and have a wealth of knowledge to help me poke holes and find things that make sense that I have not thought of, or even bypass limitations I thought would block me forever.
- powersjcb 4mo agoWe can only dream
- jacekm 4mo agoSlack recently introduced this option where it can tell you what kind of animal you are (not kidding) based on the conversations you had. When I saw this I immediately thought "managers pushed poor folks at Slack to incorporate more AI into the product".
- lsakoert 4mo ago"Absolutely anything that keeps users on our app longer is good!" Slack will start serving porn next.
- ekjhgkejhgk 4mo agoHappening at my company as well. This is an early symptom of the future devaluation of the skill of developing software. The value is going down because there is too little software developing work for the number of people who currently can do it.
- 8note 4mo agoamazon will never have that problem theres so much work available that teams try to avoid taking stuff on as much as possible. the bottleneck to building more is almost certainly the cross team coordination likely the best place add agents too. an llm tpm would be super handy tool to scale amazon productivity, rather than coding agents.
- 8note 4mo agoamazon needs to get the api gateway payload size fixed if they really want people to expand their bedrock use. that and make sure the tools are actually up treating amazon internal as real customers. its hard to stay excited about the tools when they can be down for a week because kiro launched.
- soorya3 4mo agoFeature Request: borrow and burn your teams token so that the whole projects looks green so that you can earn your performance bonus.
- insane_dreamer 4mo agoI use CC almost daily, and I have a Max subscription and have never hit a hard cap. I spend $100/month. How are people burning through hundreds/thousands of $ of tokens a week/month? What am I doing wrong.
- b3ing 4mo agoPeople want to get promoted or put things on their resume about AI, the only way is to force others to use/work with AI to bump up their numbers on the resume or to say they pushed some new AI initiative. Because all the new jobs or promotions require the new hot thing - AI.
- jzer0cool 4mo agoBetter metric than lines of code added
- markboo 4mo agoWhen a founder from a non-tech company told me that he personally spent over 2000 dollar in last month in coding (He never coded before) with proud, I'm asking him why using API instead of subscription, he told that, "the model is different, I spend more, it's a better and smarter model without limitation". I thought they just want to show up to others(especially non tech guys) that they spent high, so they know more about AI
- omnee 4mo agoIf the financial or career incentives for management relies on 'Token usage growth', then that is what will happen to the detriment of everything else.
- shibaprasadb 4mo agoI had written about the same: https://www.shibaprasadb.com/2026/04/29/tokenmaxxing-tap-in.html https://www.shibaprasadb.com/2026/04/29/tokenmaxxing-tap-in.... This is the new tap-in tap-out!
- pvtmert 4mo ago> But a representative for Amazon said that there is no such company-wide metric for AI usage, nor are there internal leaderboards where employees are measured against each other. Rather, employees are able to view their own AI usage on personal dashboards. Such a bullshit. There is (was) Amazon Q (Now QuickSuite) leaderboard which is a Quick Sight dashboard. Moreover, each PhoneTool
- pvtmert 4mo ago...each PhoneTool profile contains relevant "awards" (titles) on people's profile. Things like "Blaze", "Thunderstorm", etc are awarded publicly. Any employee can also click to these awards, and see who else also been awarded the same thing. (Plus total number of people) *) PhoneTool = Internal People Directory. Shows user-profiles of employees...
- pvtmert 4mo ago> But a representative for Amazon said that there is no such company-wide metric for AI usage, nor are there internal leaderboards where employees are measured against each other. Rather, employees are able to view their own AI usage on personal dashboards. Such a bullshit statement. There is a _global_ dashboard that ranks Kiro/QuickSuite (formerly Amazon Q) usage per-employee based on tokens. The dashboard itself is in QuickSight (well, that also became part of QuickSuite anyway). Not only the data is open to anyone, you can clearly sort by rank, daily/weekly/monthly/yearly usages. Current and former employees included. (By internal alias). Moreover, there is an internal "awards" system that shows up in PhoneTool profile, each employee gets "awarded" of Kiro/AmazonQ/Quicksuite titles like "Blaze", "Thunderstorm", etc. You can see other recipients of the same award just by clicking on it. Note: PhoneTool is an internal profile directory where you can look up other employees as oneself... --- On the side, I know several people who cannot produce proper code themselves, or integrate to anything on their own. Those who need constant hand-holding keep producing immense amount of stuff with Kiro/AmazonQ, over-ranking SDEs nowadays. (these are not SDEs, more of SysDev, Support Engineers and TPMs). This itself is not a specifically good or a bad thing. But once they stack-rank based on the token usage, I am pretty sure "good" engineers who put effort into writing "good" code will rank worse than people who does not put effort into "concise" solutions. Therefore, quality will eventually detoriate. And it will be too late once the leadership realizes what has been going on. (Well, they already seen the Amazon-Q/Kiro related outages and keep denying it...)
- ruxiz 4mo agoIt is the same in almost all tech companies now.