8 ms·
Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools
- guyzero 6mo agoOnce you have a score, you have a game. Once you have a game, people will do whatever it takes to win.
- traderj0e 6mo agoI don't think you need to win this, you just need to not be near the bottom of the board. But just in case, I spam tokens like it's the Chuck E Cheese roulette game.
- Ifkaluva 6mo agoi think the best in this case is to be solidly in the middle of the pack. don't want to be near the bottom, don't want to be a tall poppy when the backlash comes
- bsimpson 6mo agoThey're not the only well-known company I've heard of that's investigating token usage leaderboards.
- x187463 6mo agoMeasuring token usage as a productivity metric is like measuring keystrokes. Don't mind me, just over here rolling my face on the keyboard for an hour so I can take Friday off... ...except each keystroke has an associated cost, the sum of which may equal or exceed my salary.
- Weryj 6mo agoInsert photo of Simpsons drinking bird while homer sleeps here.
- Analemma_ 6mo agoWhat's nuts is how many intelligent people— people who would say "of course 'LOC written' is a terrible measure of developer productivity, of course only a dysfunctional company run by morons would do that"— have immediately bought into this. Amazon has token use mandates, I've heard Google has token use "leaderboards", friends at startups say they all get graded on tokens used. It's like watching your sensible, levelheaded friend go completely off the rails; collective madness.
- Imustaskforhelp 6mo ago> collective madness mass hysteria perhaps? There used to be a time where people used to die from dancing too much (from my understanding in which hey I can be wrong, I usually am): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_plague_of_1518 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_plague_of_1518 I think that although we wish to consider ourselves as smart and really intelligent but we run on biological machines and clocks which evolutionary have not much of a difference since 1518 or even the times when we used to hunt and forage for that matter.
- HPsquared 6mo agoIt's a test of practical intelligence.
- greesil 6mo agoSome people respond to incentives. The rest of us are just trying to do our jobs and will probably be fired and then later consumed by the basilisk. We are living in an age of extremophiles.
- guywithahat 6mo agoThis reads more like it's a single employees gripe than a real thing that's happening. They're not using the metrics in performance reviews, and it's a new AI tool that AWS probably wants legitimate usage data out of. That said, if you can't figure out how to use AI in a software job you should look into it. Not using AI at this point is a lot like not using CAD as an architect.
- KyleTheDev 6mo agoIt is being used in performance reviews, source: recent Amazon SWE. They also use a bunch of dumb metrics like, total PRs submitted, total comments made on PRs, etc. To the point that, there are multiple heavily used internal tools to game these metrics. Eg, auto-comment LGTM on any approved PR. Thus, making the metrics even worse than they would have been prior.
- guywithahat 6mo ago> Amazon has told employees that the AI token statistics would not be used in performance evaluations. > Managers are discouraged from using token use to measure performance, according to a person familiar with the matter. Like CAD and architects, if you're not using LLM's while coding it's an issue, but Amazon is very clear that this isn't an official metric. I would believe managers know how many tokens you're using, but it sounds like they just interviewed a disgruntled employee who didn't like AI and published it.
- sarchertech 6mo ago>but Amazon is very clear that this isn't an official metric. You're replying to an amazon employee who says they are being used in performance reviews, in comment thread on an article where 2 other Amazon employees say that their token usage is being tracked and they feel pressure to maximize token usage. Do you have first hand knowledge to refute these 3 people with first hand knowledge? The CAD thing is incredibly weird. I've never known an architect who had their CAD usage minutes tracked. Btw I'm a big tech company and I know many people who are "token maxing". It's very common.
- some_furry 6mo agoCan't you just, wire your agent into a Python script and have it infinitely check its own work? That would hit the metrics, but do nothing useful. Hell, throw a Tarot reading in the middle of the loop so the agent has non-deterministic behavior too. https://github.com/trailofbits/skills/tree/main/plugins/let-fate-decide https://github.com/trailofbits/skills/tree/main/plugins/let-... Amazon management wants to play five-dimensional chess? Play Balatro instead.
- tyleo 6mo agoI was thinking about this recently. I tend to run my AI at low context because the documentation states that they degrade with higher context usage. However I see tons of people on LinkedIn with ways of backing up context, not wanting to lose context, etc. This seems like another way the system is being misused. Higher context usage also uses more tokens. I suspect you get worse (and slower) output too than a dense detailed context.
- jaggederest 6mo agoI think there are two motivations that get blurred pretty quickly: a) you find a particular context that executes well and want to preserve parts of it or not have to repeat explanations b) you want to continue a session so you don't have to rebuild the context from scratch I think A is something where it's totally reasonable to preserve pieces as part of like a prompt library or equivalent, or directory-specific agent files, that kind of thing. I think B is much more likely to lead to problems if you do it over a long time, but it can be pretty useful for getting the last drop of juice out of the metaphorical orange. I think the antipattern (that I've done myself, admittedly) is swapping between different restored contexts for different tasks or roles - at that point you should be either converting it to more durable documentation if warranted, or curating it more specifically than "restore the entire context" even if it's just one-off.
- mikepurvis 6mo agoI think the answer for both cases is supposed to be finishing a "good" session with "based on what you've learned about this project, please update the CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md/README.md files." Ideally that replaces the back and forth cycle of it's this, no it's that, it's that for reasons XYZ with a single ingestible blob that gets the agent up to speed.
- jaggederest 6mo agoI've actually had mixed results with that without some manual curation - sometimes by the time a session has gone on for a while (heaven forbid it go through multiple compactions), the agent has so much extraneous/incorrect context for docs that it can't write documentation effectively. Sometimes it's better to dump context incrementally, reinitialize the agent with a subset of the context, or manually prime it, then ask it to write documentation as a focused task.
- varispeed 6mo agoSomeone pressuring to do something at work gives off creep vibes. Is that in the contract to use AI tools? If not, then what are they on about.
- ge96 6mo agoThink worst place I worked, you had to install an app like Time Bro and you had to account for all 8 hours of the day, some app logged per minute/hour.
- varispeed 6mo agoWould rather eat dirt than work at a place like that. Respect.
- woah 6mo agoThey're always pressuring me into "shipping" "features"
- mrhottakes 6mo ago"someone pressuring you to do something at work" describes pretty much all jobs Very very few jobs in the US give you a contract.
- traderj0e 6mo agoThis is true. The creepy thing is when someone outside your reporting chain is suddenly pushing you to use some new tool, rather than asking you to ship a feature.
- tapoxi 6mo agoI joked about this on HN a few weeks ago and I find it funny that we ended up here already. Goodhart's Law in action.
- _bypa 6mo agoThe fact that management signed off on measuring AI use through token usage shows how incompetent management really is, including in allegedly technical conmpanies like Amazon. Tokenmaxxing was an entirely expected and rational response. IOW You measure employees in stupid ways, you're going to get stupid behaviour as a consequence.
- koolba 6mo agoManagement loves numbers because they’re the only things you can objectively compare as X > Y. It makes for pretty charts, extrapolations, and projections. It doesn’t matter if the numbers are not particularly correct. As long as the data gathering step can be justified it’ll do. Though bonus points if making the number bigger is a good thing (v.s. tracking something like number of sev 1 issues).
- delfinom 6mo agoYes, but also because management is largely unqualified to be managing the stuff they are hired for. So they regress to numbers because they otherwise cannot participate in anything technical.
- Terr_ 6mo agoSounds a bit like a McNamara Fallacy [0] of over-prioritizing numeric measures, which--when taken "too literally"--becomes: > The first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. This is okay as far as it goes. > The second step is to disregard that which can't be easily measured or give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. > The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't very important. This is blindness. > The fourth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is suicide. — Daniel Yankelovich, "The New Odds" [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy
- wordpad 6mo agoDepends on what they're trying to incentivise. It's quite possible they aren't trying to measure performance but are literally just trying to increase token consumption to feed the bubble and hype. Plus pressure employees may find new unique use cases for AI. It's like if your goal is inflation, you give out tons of money and as long as its spent, you achieve your goal.
- christkv 6mo agoSeems to be a clear case of Goodhart's Law that states that "when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
- FartyMcFarter 6mo agoThat's true, but I don't know if this one was ever a good measure in the first place. People use AI differently and they can be equally productive with a variety of token usage quantities. Also, different kinds of work are differently amenable to using AI.
- compiler-guy 6mo agoMeasuring tokens used can absolutely be useful; tracking things like cost, compute-demand, usage to negotiate a better contract, and on and on. Using it to grade people is, err, rather unwise.
- jrflo 6mo agoI think we've found an extension of Goodhart's law- it makes bad measures even worse.
- traderj0e 6mo ago"When a measure exists, it becomes a target" is the reason I can never write TODO again.
- pjmlp 6mo agoI can tell they are surely not the only ones. Everyone I talk to has nowadays KPIs tied to AI usage on their performance evaluation.
- jnpnj 6mo agoCorporate emails asking why are you not using the <insert-llm> paid plan ??? came very very rapidly. So naturally, everybody started to use it blindly so that the dashboard metrics are all high. It's astonishing how society forgets.
- H8crilA 6mo agoThe most important skill is to not stand out of the crowd. This is how you survive in the Soviet Union, in the army, and clearly also at tech companies.
- pjmlp 6mo agoQuite a good point.
- Argonaut998 6mo agoI swear the industry is being Garry Tanned. Senior management let go our localisation staff. Now they want us to use AI to translate. They still want manual review. We use Github Copilot at work, we get a measly 300 requests with the budget to go over if necessary. Opus 4.7 or GPT 5.5 would eat all of those up in a day. Are we supposed to be using more than the allotted amount, do management see that as a good thing. Or is it best to stick within the allocated amount. Who knows? Management are playing games everywhere it seems.
- nextlevelwizard 6mo agoHow you burn 300 requests in a day? From my Copilot usage Opus consumes surprisingly few requests to do a lot of stuff. It isn’t paying by token but instead by prompt or something.
- coredog64 6mo agoOpus 4.7 has a 7.5x multiplier when it's used from Copilot. Falling back to 4.6 it's only 3.5x
- antod 6mo agoIt recently went up to 15x in our org.
- theblazehen 6mo ago300 prompts in a day isn't that unreasonable to achieve on a heavy day? And Opus has a significant multiplier as well
- antod 6mo agoYeah, thats 20 Opus 4.7 prompts.
- nextlevelwizard 6mo agoThat is a lot of prompts. What kind of prompts do you usually give? Mine are usually giving specification and telling Claude to implement some part of it, referring to existing code base, writing unittests and running e2e until it passes. This can easily take 4-5 hours. Then again, I have seen colleagues prompt “are you sure?” And other nonsense like that
- ex-aws-dude 6mo agoImagine selling a product where companies are foaming at the mouth to increase their spend and pay you more money It does not get any better than that Jensen, Sam, Dario: https://i.imgur.com/AI7rtCY.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/AI7rtCY.jpeg
- baxtr 6mo ago“Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.” ― Charlie Munger
- asdfman123 6mo agoWould that make chasing perverse outcomes in the corporate environment the Munger Games?
- coredog64 6mo agoWhen I was at Amazon, I suggested that promotion to L7 people manager should require that reverse tattooed on your forehead so that you saw it every day. Every time some mandate would come down from on high, it was clear that nobody had thought of the second order effects, malicious compliance, or just outright gaming.
- duxup 6mo agoGoodhart's law
- baxtr 6mo agoAkshually… I’d say they’re not the same but related. Goodhart’s is a corollary of Charlie Munger’s quote.
- asdev 6mo agoPeople who don't code(management, leadership) think AI will 10x the company but it's really a 40-60% boost. But engineers have to feign adopting this tools in fear of layoffs
- asdfman123 6mo ago40% boost for smart engineers, for now. People churning out slop is slowing me down and the full effects of it won't be felt for a while.
- legohead 6mo agothe new bottleneck for development at work is code reviews. devs are creating whole features that would take months in only a couple weeks, but code reviewing that is a slow, painful process
- Marsymars 6mo agoThe bottleneck at my work for development was already code review before LLMs.
- asdfman123 6mo agoThis is why I'm not that excited about vibe coding. The bottleneck has always been understanding what the heck is going on. In my view you should 1) use AI as a tool to help you learn and 2) write boilerplate you could have easily written yourself. Getting it to think for you is counterproductive (at least until it replaces us entirely).
- suzzer99 6mo agoYesterday, I had my first experience of a mid-level dev stuck on a problem, coming to me with Codex and Copilot summaries of what those tools thought the problem was, which turned out to be completely off-base. Codex was pretty sure something was wrong with the response object being returned by the endpoint in question. It turned out there was a conversion method applied to the endpoint response, which mutated its input. This method had been running w/o problems for a while, until the dev put it in a useEffect. At this point, React dev mode's policy of rendering everything twice kicked in, which caused the second pass through the conversion method to fail on the now-mutated input object. Codex never even hinted that the conversion method mutating the input could be a problem, nor anything about React dev mode rendering everything twice (specifically to catch problems like this). Apparently, neither of those came up much in its training data. My point is that this dev seems to have lost, in a few short months of writing everything with Codex, the ability to trace an error from its source (the error trace was being swallowed in a Codex-written catch block that spit out a generic error message). He was completely stuck and just kept doubling down on trying to get Codex to solve the problem, even checking with Copilot as a backup. I'm not optimistic about where this is headed.
- ortusdux 6mo agoReminds me of the managers that use 'lines of code added' as a metric
- asdfman123 6mo agoSaw a good joke on twitter about it. Something like: "You spent $23, over the $20 food limit. Be more careful next time. You spent $600 on tokens, $200 more than the average. Congratulations!"
- Handy-Man 6mo agohttps://x.com/vasuman/status/2053956365052240263 https://x.com/vasuman/status/2053956365052240263 > whoever spent $600 on Anthropic last night, great job leveraging Al! But to the person who spent $23 on Uber Eats please remember our limit for food is $20 per meal
- HarHarVeryFunny 6mo ago> They said the move reflected pressure to adopt the technology after Amazon introduced targets for more than 80 percent of developers to use AI each week, and earlier this year began tracking AI token consumption on internal leader boards. This measuring of tokenmaxxing as a proxy for something beneficial to the company has got to be the single dumbest thing I have ever heard of in my entire software career. It would be like some company in the dot com era measuring employee's internet download traffic as a proxy for productivity or internet-pilledness. Why not just reward employees based on who's submit the largest expenses claims? That might have some correlation to work too, right ?!
- asdfman123 6mo agoIn the corporate world it's impossible for any one person to tell what's going on across multiple domains due to the complexity. If I tell you the Zorbulon API is creating 30% more flargs (which is critical for Twiddle operation), I often just have to take your word for it. Hell, I'm in the bowels of Google as an IC and it's hard to understand what adjacent teams are doing. Even harder for management that never gets their hands on anything. So while you know engineers are probably bullshitting you with fake work, you can at least turn around and tell your supervisor the numbers. It's all a game of plausible deniability.
- ryandrake 6mo agoIt's truly bonkers: the reverse of a budget. It is like rewarding the people who spend the most money.
- traderj0e 6mo agoThey used to measure loc, but this is even dumber than that. The charitable explanation is they just want to make sure nobody is completely avoiding AI use.
- morelandjs 6mo agoI have mixed thoughts on this. These thoughts are my own. On the one hand, it’s objectively silly to pretend like we’ve solved the age old problem of measuring developer productivity. Metric-obsessed leadership can also be intolerable, counterproductive, and it’s a good way to paint yourself into a corner undervaluing your best talent and overvaluing your mediocre talent. That said, I’m kind of having a blast using CC in corporate with all the connectors available at our disposal, and I baffled how little some of my coworkers know about what’s available and what the capabilities are. So it’s clear that perhaps some encouragement is prudent for those who are slower to embrace new technologies, but I’m not sure tokencounting and tokenmaxing are the answer.
- retinaros 6mo agoCould you list us some of the capabilities you use that bring value besides “summarize my email”
- jkingsbery 6mo agoNot OP, but within Amazon we have pretty good connectors around integrating with our task system (so you can pretty easily ask your GenAI tool "look up the next item in our sprint board, let me know if you have any clarifying questions, but otherwise start implementing it"). We have decent integration with internal wiki and search systems, so it's easier now to figure out the best Amazon way to do some coding task. And Amazon being a big doc-writing company, there are lots of great tools for helping improve all phases of writing.
- morelandjs 6mo agoYes, we can crawl our entire internal documentation via LLM. Want to know if someone is already working in the space of your latest idea? Ask Claude, it hits the internal search APIs and finds docs and references directly relevant to your query. There are a lot of separate document stores so this took a lot of effort previously. I can also query Slack, Outlook, etc. I don’t understand the cynicism in your comment.
- 6mo ago
- retinaros 6mo agoVibecoded ppt, docs, frontends is an even bigger scam than crypto ever was. Ofc people getting sucked into it
- traderj0e 6mo agoAre the AI tokens fungible though?
- dogscatstrees 6mo agoAnother stupid meme-latching name. Don't normalize these *maxxing nonsense words and just use plain language. Let's see, maybe just say they were optimizing for token count?
- morkalork 6mo agoI like it because it highlights the stupidity going on. Bullshit doesn't deserve a respectible name.
- wenc 6mo agoWhen did FT become Business Insider? I have an FT subscription and they keep moving toward this kind of narrative first reporting to get clicks. It’s no longer a believable paper.
- jkingsbery 6mo agoI work at Amazon (standard disclaimer: just sharing my own experience, not an official spokesperson, etc.) I can't say that this isn't happening, but at least the parts of the company I get visibility into, what the article describes isn't my experience. There is a lot of interest in using GenAI, but people are mostly getting kudos around creative uses for GenAI, not just for raw amount of tokens. For most scaled GenAI efforts, there is a lot of focus on output metrics (metrics like accuracy, number of findings, number of things fixed, and so on).
- geodel 6mo ago> There is a lot of interest in using GenAI, but people are mostly getting kudos around creative uses for GenAI, LOL, I'd imagine even Amazon HR would be little restraint in showering such praise.
- thinkling 6mo agoThanks for the inside insight. I'm surprised how few comments are written with the prior that Amazon managers aren't stupid or uninformed about how incentives work. My guess would be that someone created the leaderboard without a lot of consultation with managers, and that some employees feel a competitive urge to try to "win" the leaderboard by burning tokens.
- johnbarron 6mo agoYour comment is the equivalent of stating, that Jeff Bezos and Andy Jassy, do not really know their employees are carrying around urine bottles.
- geodel 6mo agoManagement is told its a homebrew. Very commonly used by developers all over the industry.
- thinkling 6mo agoMmm, no, I don’t think it’s equivalent. I think they know that if you make the work hard, some employees will have trouble keeping up and will do things like peeing in bottles. And they’re OK with that, because they think there are enough people who can keep up that they can push the weaker people out. I think they believe that the peeing in bottle is relatively rare. I’m unsure whether that’s right or not. It’s been reported that it happens, but I have no sense whether it’s common.
- boron1006 6mo agoAt least for some people I know it’s not necessarily because there’s pressure from leadership, but because it’s funny that the org spends like $15,000/mo writing HP fanfic or whatever
- rglover 6mo agoIt is damn fascinating to see just how many (big, serious) organizations are creating unnecessary internal strife over this. One of my favorite heuristics/quotes applies here: "no matter how good the strategy, occasionally consider the result." Want to know if AI is working for your org? Ask yourself/employees to "show me the result." That requires judgment and taste (is the result something of value, or just the appearance of work having been done), but it will also save you a ton of stress and disappointment later.
- traderj0e 6mo agoEach day I send the AI on a fruitless mission like "summarize the entire codebase" while I do my actual work, which involves actually using the AI for real work. Wish I could disable the token cache to make it spend more.
- shadow28 6mo ago[dead]
- jmount 6mo agoA perfect doomsday machine. Over-using tokens gets your peers laid-off before yourself.
- amluto 6mo agoI, too, can easily use more tokens to achieve the same task. I can give worse prompts. I can fail to make it clear to the tools where to find the information they need. I can ask them to think hard when the don’t need to ask tell them not to think when they do need to. I can give vague, open ended instructions. I can generate code that sucks and throw it away. If I do all of this, do I get a promotion?
- traderj0e 6mo agoEven if I'm in the middle of using the AI seriously but then want to rename a variable, I can't do that myself because it'll confuse the AI, so I'll tell it to rename. That seems pretty wasteful.
- amluto 6mo agoAt least GPT-5.4 and up seem to do okay if I just prefix my next message with something like "(I made edits.)".
- 0cf8612b2e1e 6mo agoThat sounds like too much effort. Better to have the AI write you a 20k word manifesto about how much you love your employer and then include that in the context of every request.
- getrundoc 6mo ago[flagged]
- getrundoc 6mo ago[flagged]
- giantg2 6mo agoThis makes me think of the tulip bubble. Using AI as much as possible just so people think you are productive is like buying tulips so that people think you're affluent.
- kixiQu 6mo agoAmazon is big and inconsistent enough that "somewhere in Amazon, <XYZ> is occurring" is statistically true, no matter how nutso-sounding your <XYZ>.
- aitchnyu 6mo agoCan we have a list of AWS services which use formal methods and general sanity so I can avoid the other 500 half baked ones?
- vjvjvjvjghv 6mo agoI wish I could do some tokenmaxxing at my company. The only plan available is maxed out for the month after a few days of serious work, but the AI “experts” are declaring that nobody needs that much. It’s really frustrating to constantly have to juggle quota and lower models. All this while the declared goal is to reach 50% of code written by AI.
- arjie 6mo agoThis kind of thing is totally fine if it's being done (it's believable because Meta internally incentivized tokenmaxxing). When you're trying to change the behavior of a large number of people, only blunt instruments are available if you want to get quick outcomes. The edge cases where people Goodhart very hard are all right. You can just human-in-the-loop them away. The opportunity cost for most organizations of not moving to use AI tools as productivity enhancers is currently gauged by them (rightfully, in my opinion) to be too high to allow for osmotic adoption. Most people look at sea changes come and go. They all have a story of how they "could have bought Bitcoin when it was $100" or whatever. In an org, you don't want to have the story of "we could have done that when nobody else had", so you incentivize adoption of the tool as hard as possible and hope that dipping feet in the water makes people want to swim. If you don't already have a culture of early adoption (and no large company can) then you have to use blunt incentives. I don't think anyone has demonstrated otherwise.
- mrhottakes 6mo agoSo you're saying that if you ignore all the downsides with "you can just human in the loop them away" then it works great?
- arjie 6mo agoEven if you don't, it's the only way to ensure adoption and most workplaces consider the lack of adoption a greater danger than a Goodharted adoption. Overall, I've observed that the US has very low barrier to starting companies so, considering companies of all sizes are doing this, if it's a mistake those startups will get beaten by the ones doing other things.
- returnInfinity 6mo agoYou can use Codex and Claude code for most of the tasks that you would manually do Filing JIRA tickets, updates. Opening PRs, having AI review PRs. This will all use tokens. No need to tokenmaxx, you will end up burning tokens with just regular AI usage
- mdndkzixkn 6mo ago[dead]
- aggakake 6mo agoA very poor look for management. They don't know what the heck they're doing.
- hmokiguess 6mo agoMeasuring productivity via tokens is the modern day equivalent to doing it via number of commits or LOC
- oxag3n 6mo agoHunger games in the age of AI - eliminate/automate your colleague's job, until a single software engineer is left (or two if aristocrats will see it as a good PR).
- nicodjimenez 6mo agotokenmaxxing is silly, but if a developer or manager NEVER uses AI then I do think that's cause for concern as it shows a genuine lack of curiosity... perhaps tokenflooring makes more sense than tokenmaxxing
- mrhottakes 6mo agoOr maybe that person has made an intelligent decision based on their own workflow and requirements?
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- tonis2 6mo agoIt's the same as measuring productivity by lines of code written, same dumb logic by management, not surprising.
- zthrowaway 6mo agoOur AWS TAM has recently started to respond to us in AI-like responses. It's very obvious. Now it makes sense why.
- bgnn 6mo agoSimilar to an HFT company I know, using the money spent on tokens per developer as their efficiency metric. Insane.
- Serhii-Set 6mo ago[dead]
- dontreact 6mo agoHot take: There should be an anti leaderboard that highlight people under a threshold. Not trying to learn how to use ai while working at a company like Amazon is almost certainly a bad thing, and cause for looking into why.
- rdtsc 6mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law I was just joking about it a few days ago (I swear I didn't know Amazon was doing this) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48079533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48079533 > That’s my latest joke — that we’ll have to pretend like we used the tools so they can feel validated they’ve spent all this money on hyped up technology. So, yes, it’s em-dashes and “it’s not just this, it’s that …” so they can hopefully leave us alone
- fhn 6mo agoThese employees are going to automate themselves out of a job. I've always automated, the boss never has to know.
- fhn 6mo agoAmazon has this Kiro product they are trying to sell and they are using their own employees to improve the product and their own LLM. They are giving uni students 1000 credits/month and running competitions.
- binsquare 6mo agoamazon leaders are obsessed with "metrics" but they care very little about what those metrics actually measure it's all a political performance. Remember when they made the decision for return to office and just...decided to post no support data on why they need to do it?
- phyzix5761 6mo agoHow about we actually try to solve problems and measure that instead of measuring what we believe are the steps that resemble solving problems?
- mrbonner 6mo agoSo I have seen people using Claude to change variables’ names. Is it tokenmaxxing?
- clearstack 6mo agogaming the metrics instead of using the tools well. this'll show up in the capex ROI question at the next earnings call
- mschuster91 6mo agoOld and busted: Hey, whoever amongst you wants to try out AI in the business? Check your idea with legal to make sure we don't get busted for violating HIPAA/GDPR/PCI-DSS and you get 1 k$ worth of tokens at your favorite AI service to play around, if it's any good you get a week extra PTO. New hotness: USE AI NO MATTER WHAT AND WE WILL MONITOR EVERYTHING, THOSE WHO REFUSE TO USE AI WILL GET FIRED. And that's how you slop yourself into (at least) two major downtimes and burn millions upon millions of dollars for zero ROI - but the stonk markets don't care about lost ROI as long as you go along with the AI hype train.