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Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools
71–80 of 268 posts
Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools
#72This 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.
>Not using AI at this point is a lot like not using CAD as an architect.
You should have asked AI to come up with a better analogy.
Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools
#73A perfect doomsday machine. Over-using tokens gets your peers laid-off before yourself.
Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools
#74Each 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.
Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools
#75I 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.
300 prompts in a day isn't that unreasonable to achieve on a heavy day? And Opus has a significant multiplier as well
Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools
#76Once you have a score, you have a game. Once you have a game, people will do whatever it takes to win.
Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools
#77Another 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?
I like it because it highlights the stupidity going on. Bullshit doesn't deserve a respectible name.
Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools
#78I 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.
I guess you need automation for that. Run claude with cron to find fulnerabilities, suggest and implement improvements, automatically dig through backlog
Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools
#79I 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 C…
Could you list us some of the capabilities you use that bring value besides “summarize my email”
Not 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.
Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools
#80I, 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?