Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks

https://www.fastcompany.com/91541586/amazon-workers-pressured-to-up-ai-use-extraneous-tasks

by hackernj • 2 months ago

400 431 2 months ago

AMerrit• 2 months ago

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.

rtkwe4• 2 months ago

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.

sheept• 2 months ago

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.

overfeed• 2 months ago

Inaccurate documentation can be worse than no documentation at all!

funimpoded4• 2 months ago

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.

gdulli• 2 months ago

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.

spprashant• 2 months ago

Good old Goodhart's law. https://xkcd.com/2899/

rvz• 2 months ago

When a measure becomes a target....

SoftTalker• 2 months ago

Especially a measure that's so easily manipulated.

smitty1e• 2 months ago

I was just going to invoke Goodhart's Law

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law

onion2k3• 2 months ago

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.

My company is doing the same thing.

this_user• 2 months ago

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.

jordanb3• 2 months ago

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.

mrbungie5• 2 months ago

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.

nitwit0052• 2 months ago

That would be 20% who _might_ figure it out. That's essentially R&D spend, which has no guarantee of success.

krupan4• 2 months ago

I'm sorry, but that's insane. I mean, I guess if you have cash to burn I could think of even worse ways to spend it, but seriously, this is dumb. What other tool have businesses spent millions of dollars and person hours on to try and find something useful the tool can do?? Talk about a solution looking for a problem! If it's not clear in the early stages that this tool solves a problem then ditch it and move on! Give that extra cash to your employees and shareholders instead!

paulhebert4• 2 months ago

Every dollar your company gives to AI providers is a dollar they're not paying you.

DonsDiscountGas• 2 months ago

Unless you install meshclaw and just tell it to use a bunch of tokens

manesioz• 2 months ago

Token-driven development

MrCharismatist2• 2 months ago

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.

funimpoded4• 2 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)

jjice• 2 months ago

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.

pwillia7• 2 months ago

you don't use vim/emacs for the productivity. It's a lifestyle decision

throwway120385• 2 months ago

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.

Our_Benefactors6• 2 months ago

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!

malfist4• 2 months ago

Is it? If the LLMs change broke something do you know enough to fix it?

miyoji2• 2 months ago

It's also several hundred times more expensive.

bluefirebrand2• 2 months ago

You dont need to know that command anymore

I find it hard to read "You can do things without knowing things" as a positive improvement in work, society, life, anywhere

quikoa• 2 months ago

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.

mrbungie5• 2 months ago

Once I learn a command that is both repeatable and useful, I prefer to either keep it in my mind or in my aliases. Thank you.

funimpoded4• 2 months ago

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.

MrCharismatist2• 2 months ago

Look, I feel for junior admins, I was one 35 years ago and the only reason I'm where I am today was because I had to learn the hard way, repeatedly and often.

I use the shit out of opencode to do things as a force multiplier, not as a way to keep me from knowing what its doing.

The point at which we're optimizing for "we don't need to know that anymore" is the point at which everything blows up, because agentic work is not fully deterministic, models hallucinate even simple things.

Blindly relying on your agent weapon of choice to just do the right thing because you didn't take the time to understand how the lego fits together is an actual problem.

perrygeo• 2 months ago

I watched people ask LLMs for linting/refactoring help, burning easily 5 minutes for something that could be completed deterministically, locally, in ms using any modern editor.

Quite frankly it was embrassing. We've had tools for static analysis for ages. Use them.

Someone with better knowledge could work 100x faster using 100x fewer resources. They did it the slow, expensive way but at least didn't have to think? Odd flex.

fg137• 2 months ago

"You've used AI to do something that was a single command."

A coworker created a shared Claude Code skill in our repo.

It's obviously something that can be done as a python or bash+jq script and run deterministically.

Instead we use natural language and waste tokens for that.

mrbungie5• 2 months ago

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.

wahnfrieden3• 2 months ago

Wage workers are evaluated on behaviors, founders are evaluated on growth and revenue. Of course usage patterns and outcomes will be different

binary0010• 2 months ago

It's not required for startups. But if you are building trashy, brittle products and your main metric is speed to market, and have the expectation of high failure chances (e.g. most yc startup batches) - then yes you have to do agentic eng.

If you are making extremely specific, high quality products over a long time window and your founders are deeply experienced in that field of engineering, then no, you don't need agentic engineering and probably want very little llm code in general (outside of some boilerplate, internal toolings, etc).

SpicyLemonZest• 2 months ago

I think GenAI-agentic assisted engineering is the only way of working nowadays, and it's the only way I personally have worked for months. I still think that an outright majority of presentations on AI tooling I've seen have been in the nonsensical "Look how many tokens I can burn" genre. Had to sit through one guy recently who explained why you need a complex agentic team with 6 different roles in order to ask Claude to investigate a bug, which you most definitely do not.

themafia• 2 months ago

I still don't know how to reconcile these reports

This is work related. So you can't expect everyone to have the same input demands or output expectations.

Probably there is no dichotomy

It's literally staring you in the face.

Henchman21• 2 months ago

"You've used AI to do something that was a single command."

As time passes and the layers of abstraction pile up, later generations won't understand the underlying layers of the abstraction. This is a huge weakness in our systems development -- and a huge potential attack surface for adversaries.

epgui• 2 months ago

AI is not even an abstraction over a CLI command, in any sense.

421986• 2 months ago

New 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• 2 months ago

Let it write unit tests for every single function in the codebase lol

I've chosen the wrong profession.

mandeepj• 2 months ago

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.

grtt21• 2 months ago

Advanced 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

ryandrake4• 2 months ago

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!"

We are living in a totally bonkers time.

almost_usual2• 2 months ago

It’s preposterous, companies are blindly funding slop and the product is fool’s gold.

brewdad• 2 months ago

It'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.

isk517• 2 months ago

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.

dominotw2• 2 months ago

i call BS on this story

robotswantdata• 2 months ago

I believe it

darth_avocado3• 2 months ago

In my first job ever, I used to get my work done on time and leave. There were a few people who’d stay in the office until late and show up on weekends. Same output, but they got the promotions and my bonus got prorated.

This is the same thing.

bonesss• 2 months ago

That’s the part I don’t get: Engineers are smart enough to ask an LLM to ask other LLMs to ask other LLMs to load the policy manual then count the R’s in “LLM fork bomb”.

Additional story points completed per week, versus token-dollar spent, or some such combo would seem more sane.

But maybe they aren’t really tracking productivity, so tracking tokens is all they have? … I dunno which part of that is dumber.

jimbokun11• 2 months ago

We need an Office Space 2 just about AI shenanigans.

lbrito• 2 months ago

Exactly this.

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.

andrethegiant• 2 months ago

Bragging about token usage is like bragging about LoC written.

andai• 2 months ago

Obligatory:

Negative 2000 Lines of Code

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44381252

syntheticnature3• 2 months ago

When I was at Amazon last year, the bragging (from the AI poo-bah in my section of Amazon, note) about AI included "look at the total line count of commits from the heaviest AI users!"

So if AI screws something up and re-writes it and then screws it up again, needing another re-write, that counted as more positive than if it was done correctly, and simply, the first time.

zeroonetwothree2• 2 months ago

It’s honestly 10x worse than LOC. At least in the human era LOC had correlation to shipping features.

It’s more like bragging about compiler cycles spent.

bluGill• 2 months ago

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.

We have always been living in bonkers time.

glenngillen• 2 months ago

Most big companies still have travel agencies/companies manage their corporate travel. I can’t remember who we used when I was at Amazon, but I made a similar complaint to my manager once given I could fly cheaper in a higher class on a different airline (also one I had heaps of points with so I would have preferred it because I’d be able to upgrade further and/or use the lounge).

Turns out the price I saw in the booking portal isn’t actually what Amazon paid. It’s kinda more like a rack rate listing. But then there’s all kinds of discounting/cash back that happens on the backend based on the amount of travel booked each month.

varispeed• 2 months ago

I used to know someone whose parent worked at travel agency (also 90s) and their whole immediate family could book trips wherever, but only economy class.

badc0ffee• 2 months ago

I worked at a tech company in the early 2010s that had its own travel agency.

jimbokun11• 2 months ago

We have always been living in the Dilbert and/or Office Space universe.

dehrmann• 2 months ago

It's more like "We really value face-to-face interaction, so we're going to track that with your total travel spend. We don't want to get in the way, so there's no budget."

treis4• 2 months ago

If we suddenly went from rail travel to jets that's exactly what would happen. We'd go from 0 to all the business flights that happen today. Everyone would be under enormous pressure to not be a laggard.

cucumber3732842• 2 months ago

I washed a former intelligence agency person get interviewed on a youtube talk show and (tangential to the policy subject being discussed) they they said that's basically how it was after 9/11. We couldn't onboard people fast enough to figure out how to spend the money so while we were doing that we flew first class half way around the world to waterboard people with bottled water. The people authorizing it didn't care. They were spending X to fight terrorism. The public was never gonna see the nitty gritty breakdown.

That's basically how it seems to be with AI. Just replace "spent X fighting terrorism" with "spent X implementing AI workflows" or "invested X in AI" or whatever. Nobody actually knows or cares just how far the dollars are going.

jmyeet2• 2 months ago

You mean like using lines of code as a metric to rank engineers [1]?

Managers love metrics. Bad managers particularly love metrics. Tokens used was almost the obvious bad metric that was going to be used.

I would argue that tokens used has actually exposed a useful metric: any manager who focused on this, demanded this or ranked based on this should be fired, for being a bad manager.

[1] https://evan-soohoo.medium.com/did-elon-musk-really-fire-peo...

malfist4• 2 months ago

In many many many cases it's not the manager choosing to do that. Its our brilliant job creator class demanding that he does

xp844• 2 months ago

LoC can occasionally give you signal. For instance, imagine you are joining a new team or company so you don't know how much oversight your predecessor did. If you ask an engineer how they spend most of their time and they say "Mostly just writing code" and you look at GitHub and it says they've made 3 minor commits in the past quarter, that person is lying and your predecessor was incompetent (quite possibly both of them have been MIA from their responsibilities for months).

No, I'm not talking about the engineer who can point to significant contributions outside of code: writing technical specs, leading architecture discussions, etc. I'm talking about the ones who just say they're just coding, but are actually not working at all.

TL;DR LoC and commit count etc can be used only to flag for review likely cases of quiet quitting.

dkarl2• 2 months ago

I kind of get what they're thinking in trying to make sure all engineers use AI. For myself, and for the engineers working with me, I saw everyone go through an initial aversion and resistance to AI, and then an instant productivity boost when we started using them. So there's definitely a good reason to get everybody to start using AI. You don't want a good engineer resisting AI indefinitely if you know it will make them more productive.

Incentivizing people who are already using AI to use as many tokens as possible does seem a little crazy, though.

com2kid• 2 months ago

There is a limit somewhere, but I keep finding more and more ways to use AI.

Not just coding, but things like "here is my teams mandate, go through all my company's slack channels, linear tasks, notion pages, and recent merges in got, summarize any work other teams are doing that intersect with my team's work."

That'll burn a lot of tokens.

Set that up to run once or twice a week and give a report.

swatcoder• 2 months ago

It's worth reflecting on why it's so hard to convince hold outs to discover how AI might help them. The fundamental issue is that there really aren't many convincing demonstrations that hold outs can relate to and there remains basically no evidence of real value gained.

Users attest to higher productivity and point to material but intermediate factors like token use, generated lines of code, pr counts, etc, but there doesn't seem to be a convincing revolution in the quantity or quality of mature software being delivered.

Combine that puzzling impressions of outcomes with a sense, for many, that they don't feel like they have a personal problem that warrants a new tool, and you end up with a pretty earnest and defensible indifference.

To get hold out engineers using AI, the industry needs to be focused on demonstrating relatable workflow improvements and demonstrating practical improvements to finished work product. Instead, policies like token use incentives just rely on luring them into pulling the slot machine handle with the expectation that once they do, they'll join the cadre of other converts who justify their transition with subjective improvements and intermediate metrics.

recursive6• 2 months ago

I've been using it for many months. I still haven't gotten any kind of boost. If I'm going to get ranked on token use though, best believe I'll be using the optimal quantity of tokens.

jimbokun11• 2 months ago

Yeah management should make clear they just don’t want to see AI use of zero in a given week. Not “more tokens consumed the better“ on performance reviews.

bigstrat20033• 2 months ago

People are not actually more productive with LLMs, they are less productive. The data has shown this. So there's no reason to push people into using them - it's all just hype and magical thinking.

akomtu• 2 months ago

IMO, the investors behind AI play the Uber game: they subsidise the AI costs and inject it into all facets of society they can get their hands on. They can tell the execs to increase AI usage at any cost. Their bet is that we'll become AI addicts with athrophied brains before they run out of money.

Also, don't forget that their datacenters will burn our electricity and boil our rivers at rates much cheaper than what we are billed in our homes. So while you're happy generating mountains of AI slop, somewhere there is a datacenter boiling a river.

I'd compare this to a new patented formula of water that's nobody asked for, and the patent owners are trying to replace all water supply with their crap before we wake up.

krupan4• 2 months ago

But Brawndo's got what plants crave. It's got electrolytes.

vharuck• 2 months ago

No need to invoke a hypothetical water example, just look to how Nestlé pushed baby formula in developing countries¹:

For example, IBFAN claims that Nestlé distributes free formula samples to hospitals and maternity wards; after leaving the hospital, the formula is no longer free, but because the supplementation has interfered with lactation, the family must continue to buy the formula.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Nestl%C3%A9_boycott

866-RON-0-FEZ• 2 months ago

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.

I had a manager like this once. He didn't last very long, but it was without a doubt the most fun six months of my career.

fooker• 2 months ago

This would be hilarious if a bunch of companies did not already do exactly this with exec travel. And academics do this all the time when travel has to be funded from grants.

One reason it works out like that for travel funding is that it’s often the ‘use it or lose it’ kind of funding. If you do not use all of the funds allotted, you can’t ask for more and could realistically get less.

AlexandrB• 2 months ago

I wonder where in business school they teach you to "measure inputs and try to maximize them", because that's basically what's happening.

xp844• 2 months ago

Even as a very happy NVDA shareholder I agree with you. It's comical that managers are being so naïve as to think that you can crap out a dashboard of "tokens consumed per week" and get any useful signal at all from it, beyond learning who's not using AI.

Incompetent use of a coding agent, or just general shenanigans, can burn tokens all day but it's not going to get tickets done.

Just looking at the work output - how many story points, tickets, how many new bugs are opened, etc. has not become any less relevant a metric for productivity with AI. If you're a skilled and proper user of AI those numbers would be changing in the right direction, compared to before you had it.

svachalek2• 2 months ago

All those numbers are equally gameable and terrible metrics for productivity. With any of those, as with AI spending, you've got to look at actual results qualitatively. There's no shortcut.

autoexec4• 2 months ago

It's comical that managers are being so naïve as to think that you can crap out a dashboard of "tokens consumed per week" and get any useful signal at all from it, beyond learning who's not using AI.

If some guy decides to spend a bunch of money bringing AI tools into the company things might get very uncomfortable for him if they're seeing zero return on that investment. He's sure not going to get recognition and a massive bonus for it. If on the other hand, he can put some numbers in a spreadsheet or powerpoint showing that employees are using AI all the time and profits are up again this quarter, maybe he can take some credit for that or at least keep his boss or the company's shareholders from questioning the wisdom of dumping so much cash into those AI products.

kingleopold• 2 months ago

because it's come to CFO's as "free debt" aka fiat printing. They need to spend thisfree fiat to keep buble going. I'm sure some inv. banking team internally assured too. $Trillion instuitions have access to free printer now, you and I don't. This is different world since unlimited printer started in 2020. All debt math is fake now because they can create fiat money out of nothing, literally.

autoexec4• 2 months ago

It feels like all of big tech (and some smaller firms) have simultaneously gone insane.

Some companies might just have been scammed by the marketing that told them that AI would make all their employees 10,000x more productive and save them billions and when that didn't happen the assumption was that it's because employees weren't using the magical AI as often as they should be.

Other companies, especially those working on their own AI products, might want employees to use AI as much as possible because they hope it will provide them with the training data they'll need to eventually replace most or all of those employees with the AI. Punishing workers who refuse to train their AI replacement might make sense to them because even though it's costly right now they expect the savings down the road to be much much greater.

malfist4• 2 months ago

At my company we were told AI spend was part of perf review and that the "singularity" had happened. Now 20% of our infrastructure spend is tokens. The average number of pull requests per dev per week increased with all this spend. From 4.2 to 5.1. And that includes a huge chunk of PRs that are just agents changing a line or two in a config. It's all magical thinking

Sharlin• 2 months ago

Wow, the Singularity happened and nobody bothered to tell me about it?! Vernor Vinge and I.J. Good must be rolling in their graves fast enough to rip a hole in spacetime. Allow me to coin a term for this: Singflation.

spaniard89277• 2 months ago

Since you're an idiot or fired if you point at this, just collect the money man.

It's their money. They want to do stupid things? So be it.

mynameisash• 2 months ago

The average number of pull requests per dev per week increased with all this spend. From 4.2 to 5.1.

That's it? I've seen people that are consistently putting out four PRs per day. I don't/can't even code review them. So much of what we do is now just rubber-stamping PRs. We were even told that we shouldn't be writing code by hand anymore.

treis4• 2 months ago

It's definitely not. It's a fundamental shift on how we interact with computers.

It's a tractors on farms kind of moment.

01284a7e• 2 months ago

I think a lot of these execs have equity in Anthropic... and the dumb ones that don't are just "keeping up with the Joneses" so to speak.

twa927• 2 months ago

It's like if class-based society materialized within the IT. And the manager class collectively pushes the narrative of AI replacing ICs.

Note that it has beaten capitalism, making rational choices to increase earnings has lost to this AI dream.

chadgpt35• 2 months ago

Note that propagandizing managers was a rational choice by AI companies to increase the revenue of AI companies.

ljsprague• 2 months ago

I've definitely been in situations where managers tell me to "spend X amount before the end of the year." They don't want higher ups to think they can cut our budget.

crabbone2• 2 months ago

You'd be surprised...

I worked for an international (mothership in the UK, later acquired by the US) company, which had... sort of a similar policy.

So, the (mothership) company acquired a lot of satellite companies, all in banking business. All over the world. Then they figured their CEO was corrupt, got in problems with the law, got kicked out. While they were waiting for the new "real" CEO to step in, they let some "interim" CEO to take his place.

New new (interim) CEO didn't seem to have a clue about the business she was supposed to run, nor did she care. She knew her time was running out, and she figured she'd spend it traveling the world and partaking in fine dining in every corner of the world the company's tentacle could reach. But, to make it seem more plausible, she, sort of, created a policy of "experience exchange", which sent random troupes of select individuals from different branches of the company to "exchange experience" with another similarly randomly assembled troupe. Of course, the company picked the bill when it comes to lodging and dining.

Our inconsequential branch in Israel saw a pilgrimage of high-ranking banking managers from all over the world, but, mostly the wealthier parts of it. Some didn't even bother to show up in the office though, and proceeded straight to the banquet hall of the most expensive hotel on the Tel Aviv beach.

To be fair though, the interim CEO got the boot even before her time was supposed to end, but it was serendipitously close to the acquisition by the US company, and so she was let go as part of a "restructuring" and "optimization"... but it was a crazy year!

xnx• 2 months ago

Good time to be a sane company then. "Never interrupt your opponent while he is in the middle of making a mistake." and all.

uuyy2• 2 months ago

awesome phrase

MrBuddyCasino• 2 months ago

People think we’re living in oh so capitalist times, why then does everything smell soviet.

sph2• 2 months ago

Horseshoe theory

osigurdson2• 2 months ago

It seems like a natural result. People have been trying to use dashboards / metrics to roll up / indicate how well teams and individuals have been doing for a long time. Therefore, "part 1" was already in place. Now, something even easier to track is available (token usage). So, just throw token usage on the dashboard and tell people that higher is better - what other outcome would you possibly expect?

12_throw_away• 2 months ago

dashboards / metrics to roll up / indicate how well teams and individuals have been doing for a long time

I'm actually a little curious about how long it has been. Bad managers have always prioritized irrelevant metrics, of course, but I have a feeling (backed by no data, just vibes) that management in general crossed a point of no return as soon as "data-driven" became a cross-industry buzzword.

Like, I vaguely remember a time when consumer interactions didn't always come with a request to fill out a survey (with the results getting turned into a number and fed into a dashboard somewhere). And then that changed, and now everything must turned into a number and that number must go up.

recursivecaveat• 2 months ago

Management has confided in me that token usage is a secret performance metric. At the same time I'm getting emails from infrastructure people about prompting techniques to get LLMs to speak more concisely to save the company money lmao. I'd prefer a video essay mode that bulks everything up.

Two years ago everyone would have told you that 'impact' was the way to measure people, and been aghast at tracking inputs like hours. Say what you will, but at least showing up at 8 didn't cost the company money. Today I see people spending time and money vibe coding tools in search of a problem, just to spend tokens and demonstrate that they're on board with the singularity.

dtnewman4• 2 months ago

This is what inspired me to build my new CLI tool, Burn, Baby, Burn (https://github.com/dtnewman/burn-baby-burn/tree/main).

(If you are a VP at Amazon, yes, I'll consider acquisition offers. I'm also working on an enterprise version of this with additional features.)

Show HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48151287

stephenhuey• 2 months ago

Just sent it to some developers who could really benefit from this! Please let us know when you have Codex and Gemini versions ready to rumble.

LikeBeans• 2 months ago

Brilliant

dyauspitr4• 2 months ago

Only problem with this is that outcome metrics are still jira storypoints. Burning huge number of token while not improving the velocity is going to get you fired.

cyanydeez2• 2 months ago

any plans for a distributed deployment via cloudflare works. I'm not sure this thing is powerful enough for my use case.

eudamoniac3• 2 months ago

Won't the company audit the requests to AI and see you're sending a bunch of BS?

sph2• 2 months ago

AI-powered cobra breeding tool.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive

jimbokun11• 2 months ago

This is hilarious and utter genius.

dyauspitr4• 2 months ago

Nonsense. It’s a little bit of a loss leader so devs are hooked on it and it’s considered incredibly unproductive to work without one. Then they will just have 10 peoples jobs replaced with one guy.

overgard• 2 months ago

Look it might seem silly, but the point is to get all our employees to be travel-pilled. They just don't know how great travel is yet.

eudamoniac3• 2 months ago

I'm making sure to use the most expensive model possible for the stupidest shit constantly. They asked for it!

OtomotO• 2 months ago

The most important part being:

"Because we FEEL this will make you more productive and we will make more money!"

No evidence but more Lines of Code...

proteal• 2 months ago

What if instead the manager was saying: “hey team I need you to all buy as many lotto tickets as possible!”

I feel like that’s a better analogy. Some charlatans are buying fake tickets, but as a manager who wants to win big, I’m ok with some chicanery so long as the average person is trying to honestly meet my directive.

Skidaddle• 2 months ago

It might be an ROI calculation, e.g. some people will waste tokens, but if it means someone else feels empowered to make something awesome or impactful, it will have been worth it.

2muchcoffeeman• 2 months ago

Spending is just a proxy for AI use here. This is nothing new. I remember past CEOs saying “Ajax! Ajax! Ajax!”, “Big data! Big data! Why aren’t we using Big data!”

AI is just the next tool to over spend on in poor ways, realise it’s shit and spend a ton more money trying to roll it back.

The situations where is shines will continue to use it when the hype dies down.

DanielHB• 2 months ago

Oh wow, I totally forgot that "Ajax! Ajax! Ajax!" was a thing back then, that was at the beginning of my career and it was just as baffling hearing executives calling for a such a under the hood tech choice without understanding how it actually works.

The "Big data!" calls though did make more sense coming from executives, obviously it was also often dumb, but it was a lot easier for them to understand the results. However most companies would have been better off waiting 5-10 years before jumping into it as a lot of money was wasted on processes and tools that are completely outdated today.

naveen99• 2 months ago

its more like you have purchased unlimited monthly travel for a fixed cost for your employees for $20. And you want your employees to maximize travel, since you already paid the $20.

zombot• 2 months ago

If you view AI as a religion, it starts to make sense: "There is this new god now, and if we don't worship properly, we will get eaten."

rambojohnson• 2 months ago

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.

blindriver2• 2 months ago

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.

drivingmenuts2• 2 months ago

You 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• 2 months ago

Goodhart's Law in effect right there.

pjc503• 2 months ago

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.

lmkg• 2 months ago

This 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• 2 months ago

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”?

buellerbueller2• 2 months ago

Gotta scale and then IPO those startups, so the VCs can cash out profitably.

andrekandre9• 2 months ago

  > just for the sake of using the tokens

capital requires growth, forests be damned

danaw2• 2 months ago

don'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

wolvoleo5• 2 months ago

Yeah 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 :(

jordanb3• 2 months ago

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.

CaptainTaboo• 2 months ago

Things definitely feel 'Soviet' at my company. AI usage has been mandated by upper management (despite the fact that it doesn't really make sense or solve any problems in my particular job). They literally call it an "AI revolution." If you dare question the wisdom of the company's 'AI-First' policy, it's like you risk being singled out as a "counter-revolutionary."

throw-the-towel• 2 months ago

Yeah, the stories I've heard from Meta are very Soviet-coded. Like, trying to exceed the plan but not too much, because then the new plan would be hopelessly unachievable and you'd be punished for not meeting the insane expectations.

nathan_compton• 2 months ago

The problem is that the founding fathers believed in constraining the state because it could be abusive, but they should have understood that all power ought to be subject to the people, not just state power.

danaw2• 2 months ago

soviet-coded minus the cheap/free housing and public transit

kylestlb2• 2 months ago

Surprise - capitalism has always been top down planning. The bosses are the planners, my friend.

Insimwytim• 2 months ago

USSR nearly made whales extinct

USSR barely accounted for 15% of the world caught amount (with Japan as the leader).

that nobody wanted to eat

unsubstantiated.

tencentshill• 2 months ago

Whale meat is really bad, now only eaten ceremonially in most places. It was an unrationed meat in the Britain during WWII, and people still didn't go for it.

linsomniac2• 2 months ago

unsubstantiated

Agreed for USSR, but I think the person you replied to is misremembering the country, I believe they are thinking of Japan. I heard it recently on Stuff You Should Know, which usually does a good job of researching their stories, and it sounds like it is substantiated but may be a bit more complex than presented, but literally true.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/save-the-whales/id2789... https://theworld.org/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/japa... https://theworld.org/stories/2019/04/16/whaling-japan-2 https://japantoday.com/category/national/75-of-meat-from-jap... https://www.traffic.org/site/assets/files/3994/whale_meat_tr...

brabel• 2 months ago

Thank you for correcting that awfully incorrect factoid.

pjc503• 2 months ago

see https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/06/history-of-sovie...

and https://www.i-deel.org/blog/mass-killing-for-no-reason-the-p...

pjmlp3• 2 months ago

No worries, we keep drinking from paper straws, because that is what really matters.

The problem with not burning tokens is when you not meet the performance KPIs, get labelled as luddite and off you go, even before the job gets taken over by AI.

I do agree with the sentiment, that and war mongers destroying the planet.

ZeroGravitas2• 2 months ago

What's the logic of dissing paper straws in a comment raging against war and AI as threats to the environment?

I see it a lot and assumed it was concern trolling from plastic manufacturers or libertarians funded by them but you seem genuine.

Have you just fallen for that concern trolling? Grown so cynical that nothing matters anymore? I don't understand the intention if you have a genuine desire to improve society.

What would we be doing differently in a world where we were still using plastic straws? Would that have freed up enough mental energy for a revolution? Would people be blowing up private jets while sipping their diet coke?

nateglims2• 2 months ago

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.

par• 2 months ago

Narrator: “it wasn’t just Amazon”

mjr002• 2 months ago

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.

MeetingsBrowser3• 2 months ago

I have heard from multiple people at smaller to medium sized orgs where token usage and AI adoption are a central part of performance reviews.

ekjhgkejhgk3• 2 months ago

Yeah 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.

esafak• 2 months ago

I would leave.

mial• 2 months ago

Sounds like an actual psychopath.

da768• 2 months ago

He's building his GitHub resume

r_lee• 2 months ago

Sounds like the perfect employee honestly. I bet he's beloved by the upper management

kittikitti• 2 months ago

There are some secret random seeds that will prevent the end token and just keep generating forever. This will ruin your hardware though.

wolvoleo5• 2 months ago

This 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_usual2• 2 months ago

Corporate 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.

andrekandre9• 2 months ago

  > AI slop fool’s gold is the product.

juniors who are stuck on ai and cant learn is the real product imo

netdevphoenix• 2 months ago

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

nateglims2• 2 months ago

Amazon runs anthropic models in it's own DCs with Bedrock.

brcmthrowaway• 2 months ago

How does this work?

Anthropic sends .gguf and a claude-serve binary?

mattas• 2 months ago

Waiting for the YC startup in the next batch that provides tokenmaxxing-as-a-service.

swader999• 2 months ago

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!

monkaiju3• 2 months ago

Similar 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• 2 months 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

buellerbueller2• 2 months ago

This seems like AI is the new ponzi scheme.

shriek• 2 months ago

When are they going to admit that they over invested in AI and somehow have to justify that spend with usage down our throat?

whynotmaybe• 2 months ago

Just like return-to-office is there to maintain real estate value.

tyleo2• 2 months ago

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.

drivingmenuts2• 2 months 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.

Insanity2• 2 months ago

High 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• 2 months ago

Use Vim or you're fired!

d_philla• 2 months ago

this one is legit the right call, though

noworriesnate• 2 months ago

But 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/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Notepad

saltcured2• 2 months ago

Hell, I'd resign.

But, I can't figure out how to put my job back into command mode :-(

laweijfmvo2• 2 months ago

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.

wolvoleo5• 2 months ago

In 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.

wahnfrieden3• 2 months ago

It'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

tyleo2• 2 months ago

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.

Aurornis• 2 months ago

I'm in a large-ish peer group for engineering managers. AI token over-use is a growing problem.

The problem explodes at any company that puts up a token use leaderboard or hints that they might do layoffs for engineers that refuse to use AI tools. This triggers a race to use as many tokens as possible to stay ahead.

Anecdotally, the problem is worst among devs who read a lot of social media. Twitter, Threads, Mastodon, LinkedIn, and others are filled with recycled viral stories about companies going AI-native and firing people who don't use enough AI. Anxieties are high right now so nervous developers see this and think they must burn tokens faster than their peers to avoid an inevitable culling.

blindriver2• 2 months ago

My friend at Google says they have a "ai-usage" dashboard that tracks everyone's ai token usage as well as aggregated per team, per org, etc. There's a sign on it that says "don't use this for perf reviews!" but I think everyone knows that that's exactly what they're going to use it for.

eunoia3• 2 months ago

Fellow FAANG. We have weekly manager meetings where leadership encourages us to increase token usage. We do push back, and leadership acknowledges that token spend is not a great metric and people are likely to game it... and then go right back to encouraging us to increase token spend in our teams.

We have token tracking dashboards that leadership is looking at. I know because they show us in these manager meetings. Haven't opened them to everyone yet as some kind of leaderboard, so at least that's nice.

Lots of rumors token spend will be involved in perf reviews. Leadership denies it... but then holds more meetings telling us how important it is to increase our token spend and discussing inadequacies from the token spend dashboards.

laweijfmvo2• 2 months ago

Interesting. When you say leadership along with manager meetings, are you referring to managers, who might just be exacerbating the rumors I mentioned, or actual company leadership, like Directors, Vps, etc? And are they saying “AI usage”, or explicitly “Token count”?

hirvi743• 2 months ago

I do not want FAANG and FAANG does not want me. So, as a goblin, I must ask: how is your and your team's morale doing?

People in FAANG likely worked hard to get in there or lucked out or some combination of both. I feel like my soul would be crushed if I hacked away at Leetcode for months on end just to babysit and gaslight some algorithm into asymptotically following my instructions.

pjmlp3• 2 months ago

Enterprise consulting here, it is getting ridiculous, with forced trainings, workshops and hacktons to motivate use of AI in daily activities.

Stuff that could be easily done as shell scripts gets asked how could we make an agent out of it.

thelopa• 2 months ago

I recently left a FAANG. Shortly before I left (for unrelated reasons) the director of my org got scolded by the VP he reported to because token usage in his org was low. After that the ICs in my org were told to use ai for everything or there could be consequences for their careers.

hirvi743• 2 months ago

I wonder if we will ever reach a point on society where tokens just become the universal currency. We will all work for tokens, pay our bills in tokens, make purchases in tokens, strippers will dance for tokens, etc..

I'm kidding, of course... but human stupidity is infinite, so...

eikenberry2• 2 months ago

I recently left a FAANG.

Congratulations!

nitwit0052• 2 months ago

We got an email stating our managers would be monitoring our usage. I got an angry slack scolding for zero AI use, which was simply that I'd been signed on with an alternate version of my email, and they hadn't accounted for that.

gofreddygo• 2 months ago

Long live Goodhart!

Qem2• 2 months ago

It'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/

philipallstar4• 2 months ago

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.

[0] https://nintil.com/the-soviet-union-achieving-full-employmen...

Qem2• 2 months 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.

krupan4• 2 months ago

Are you sure this isn't being funded by our taxes? How many data centers are being built in areas where they have been given a huge tax break? How many banks are loaning money for AI infrastructure knowing that they'll be bailed out by taxpayers if they fail?

monkaiju3• 2 months ago

as it isn't funded through taxes

This is simply not true, especially when you consider the massive amounts of government support so many parts of this "experiment with their own money" is getting. As a Utah resident its extremely evident in how forcefully they're pushing through what will be one of the largest datacenters in the world despite near universal disapproval from the citizens.

rdedev• 2 months ago

Right now there are state govts bending over backwards to provide cheap energy for data centers. The difference is being paid by people who live nearby through increased electricity costs. This is a tax with just extra steps

chadgpt35• 2 months ago

Some of these companies derive their revenue in a way similar to taxes, as you're forced to pay them for services. I don't see why it matters whether it's technically defined as a tax or not, if you still have to pay. Think of the TV license fee in some countries, or rent.

jknoepfler• 2 months ago

If GDP is going up, we must be wealthier and more productive, right? Surely? (/s)

throwmeaway876• 2 months ago

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.

pyrolistical• 2 months ago

Crappy 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

devmor• 2 months ago

I 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.

delbronski• 2 months ago

This 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• 2 months ago

"When a metric becomes the target, it ceases to be a good measure".

arian_• 2 months ago

yesterday's front page: AI is making me dumb. today's front page: employees are making AI dumb. the circle is complete.

jorblumesea• 2 months ago

Has anyone actually seen true business lift from agents or is this one of those "do stupid things faster" situation?

121789• 2 months ago

I 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

xyzal• 2 months ago

Love it. This needs to become a new trend, and price per token can't rise soon enough.

paulorlando• 2 months ago

The Casual form of Goodhart's Law... https://unintendedconsequenc.es/new-morality-of-attainment-g...

throwatdem12311• 2 months ago

When your incentive is to tokenmaxx don’t be suprised when people game the system. Measurements something somethjng benchmark something something bad.

avelis• 2 months ago

Goodharts Law - When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

https://lawsofsoftwareengineering.com/laws/goodharts-law/

MeetingsBrowser3• 2 months ago

But does Goodhearts law apply to things that were never a good measure to start with :)

chris_engel• 2 months ago

I 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• 2 months ago

The 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• 2 months ago

Made this as a joke but maybe it'll get some use

https://token-burner.pages.dev/

dhruvrrp• 2 months ago

I 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_• 2 months ago

Right, the leaderboard is internal.

bravetraveler2• 2 months ago

I'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.

MeetingsBrowser3• 2 months ago

Anecdotal, 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.

bravetraveler2• 2 months ago

You'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!

krupan4• 2 months ago

So 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?

general1465• 2 months ago

Vicious 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• 2 months ago

Dumb bureaucracy with dumb requirements will be met with corresponding response.

AvAn12• 2 months ago

1. 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.

anigbrowl• 2 months ago

Maybe 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.

mactavish88• 2 months ago

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

xiaoyu2006• 2 months 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• 2 months ago

can't come home today babe im tokenmaxxing

dtnewman4• 2 months ago

This article inspired me to build "Burn, baby burn", a CLI tool for burning tokens. See:

- Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48151287

- github: https://github.com/dtnewman/burn-baby-burn

linsomniac2• 2 months ago

Counterpoint: 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• 2 months ago

It’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• 2 months ago

The "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.

Insanity2• 2 months ago

Devil'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• 2 months ago

Unlike other AI models, OpenClaw and MeshClaw run locally on users’ own hardware, giving them unprecedented independence.

No, they don’t.

habosa• 2 months ago

They 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.

giancarlostoro2• 2 months ago

Here 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• 2 months ago

We can only dream

HyperL0gi• 2 months ago

“Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.” ― Charlie Munger

jacekm• 2 months ago

Slack 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• 2 months ago

"Absolutely anything that keeps users on our app longer is good!"

Slack will start serving porn next.

ekjhgkejhgk3• 2 months ago

Happening 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.

8note2• 2 months ago

amazon 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.

8note2• 2 months ago

amazon 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• 2 months ago

Feature Request: borrow and burn your teams token so that the whole projects looks green so that you can earn your performance bonus.

insane_dreamer• 2 months ago

I 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• 2 months ago

People 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• 2 months ago

Better metric than lines of code added

markboo• 2 months ago

When 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• 2 months ago

If 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• 2 months ago

I had written about the same: https://www.shibaprasadb.com/2026/04/29/tokenmaxxing-tap-in....

This is the new tap-in tap-out!

pvtmert3• 2 months 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

pvtmert3• 2 months 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...

pvtmert3• 2 months 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• 2 months ago

It is the same in almost all tech companies now.

Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks

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