Not 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!"
I know some that was told to try and use AI more on the job so they created some agent to just burn tokens and ended up using about 10x what the next highest employee used. Buddy expected to get shit but instead got an accolade and was asked to give a short talk to the other employees about how they could match their success.
My dad worked at a company that had their own travel agency (early 90s when you needed a travel agent for reasons that no longer apply), and he was often booked on the more expensive flight because the travel agency made more money. More than once he could have got first class for less on a different flight but company policy didn't allow him to fly first class.
And the fact that it is an industry-wide meme at this point makes bright red flashing lights and klaxons go off on my mind that a catastrophic reckoning can't be too far. There's not enough money in the world to keep this up for too long.
Like 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.
I 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)
Cursor 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.
I still don't know how to reconcile these reports with what other people say about GenAI-agentic assisted engineering being the only way of working nowadays, especially in startups.
Probably there is no dichotomy going on and it depends on multiple factors, but it seems so weird to see reports that are so different between each other.
I think you'll find that a lot of big investment companies are buried to the hilt in a lot of tech companies and also OpenAI and Anthropic. So you can do the math on where the directive is coming from and why it's not particularly careful or measured.
> You've used AI to do something that was a single command
Yes, and that’s a good thing! This is in fact where a lot of AI value lies. You dont need to know that command anymore - knowing the functional contract is now sufficient to perform the requisite work duties. This is huge!
Not even joking that the main benefit I've seen from "AI" for editing code is that it lets me quickly do all the things I could already have been doing just as quickly if I'd ever bothered to learn to use my tools.
Of course I lose about as much time as I save to its fuck-ups, so I'd still have been better off learning to actually use a text editor properly. Though (as I mentioned in a another post) part of why I've never done that in 25ish years of writing code for pay is that my code-writing speed has never been too slow for any of the businesses I've worked in, i.e. other things move slowly enough it never mattered.
I can't tell if this comment is sarcasm or not. If you let AI run commands you don't understand (especially in production) you may end up with some nasty surprises.
I 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.
I feel like it depends on the leader. I've definitely seen leaders value LoC beyond reason and cause worse, bloated codebases by rewarding cowboys with 10k line PRs.
Big companies have thousands of leaders. Many good, many bad.
We 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.
Lots 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.
I've been noticing how our economy keeps getting more Soviet as it becomes more top-down. We basically have central planning now with all the pathologies inherent in that system, but unlike the soviets we just have a bunch of guys who happened to get rich or bribe the right people running our GOSPLAN.
Bullshit 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”?
I'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.
That 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.
It 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.
Even 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.
Within 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.
I'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.
What'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.
I'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.
There'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.
Giving 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.
Just 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.
At 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.
People 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.
People 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!
I 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.
Hasn'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
Being 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.
This 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.
This 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.
We are living in a totally bonkers time.
Things that rhyme with this have indeed been happening at the biggest names.
We have always been living in bonkers time.
And the fact that it is an industry-wide meme at this point makes bright red flashing lights and klaxons go off on my mind that a catastrophic reckoning can't be too far. There's not enough money in the world to keep this up for too long.
Negative 2000 Lines of Code
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44381252
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.
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)
Probably there is no dichotomy going on and it depends on multiple factors, but it seems so weird to see reports that are so different between each other.
Yes, and that’s a good thing! This is in fact where a lot of AI value lies. You dont need to know that command anymore - knowing the functional contract is now sufficient to perform the requisite work duties. This is huge!
Of course I lose about as much time as I save to its fuck-ups, so I'd still have been better off learning to actually use a text editor properly. Though (as I mentioned in a another post) part of why I've never done that in 25ish years of writing code for pay is that my code-writing speed has never been too slow for any of the businesses I've worked in, i.e. other things move slowly enough it never mattered.
I find it hard to read "You can do things without knowing things" as a positive improvement in work, society, life, anywhere
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.
Big companies have thousands of leaders. Many good, many bad.
[1] https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-full-employment/
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-employmen...
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.
How are we sliding face first into “snowpiercer but dumber”?
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 :(
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've chosen the wrong profession.
If you can't change your company, change your company!
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law
The original (third reich): "Wheels must roll for victory!"
It will end in the same manner.