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Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools

arstechnica.com

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Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools

#31

Post by mikepurvis »

tyleo wrote: post #6

I 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 d…

I think the more you anthropomorphize it the more it feels like "but I don't want to have to start all over getting it up to speed, this instance already knows all the important stuff."

If every exchange is treated as an independent query/response then it's much easier to see how cutting out the fluff using a combination of its summaries and your own helps stay focused.

Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools

#33

Post by compiler-guy »

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #25
christkv wrote: post #20

Seems 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."

That'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.

Measuring 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.

Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools

#34

Post by nextlevelwizard »

Argonaut998 wrote: post #29

I 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.…

How 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.

Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools

#36

Post by 12_throw_away »

guywithahat wrote: post #4

This 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.

> They're not using the metrics in performance reviews

Heh. No need to be ashamed, I used to believe them when they lied to me like this too!

Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools

#37

Post by mikepurvis »

jaggederest wrote: post #26
tyleo wrote: post #6

I 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 d…

I 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 age…

I 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.

Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools

#40

Post by varispeed »

ge96 wrote: post #21
varispeed wrote: post #10

Someone 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.

Think 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.

Would rather eat dirt than work at a place like that. Respect.
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