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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

#101

Post by cousinbryce »

wordpad wrote: post #48
_bypa wrote: post #16

The 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.

Depends 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.

I would guess they are trying to maximize training data

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

#102

Post by this_user »

_bypa wrote: post #16

The 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.

One argument I have heard in favour of this is that management knew this would be a side effect, but that it's more important to have people engage with AI as much as possible simply to explore what is actually possible. You are effectively knowingly wasting money in the expectation that you might learn something useful that will be more valuable in the long run.

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

#103

Post by arjie »

This 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.

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

#104

Post by returnInfinity »

You 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

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

#106

Post by spike021 »

_bypa wrote: post #16

The 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.

My current job is doing the exact same thing. My manager even showed me a tool with graphs showing token use and related metrics.

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

#107

Post by asdfman123 »

legohead wrote: post #69
asdfman123 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

40% 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.

the 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

This 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).

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

#108

Post by thisislife2 »

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.…

It's just not with AI though. It's who they get their advise from. One of my friend was cribbing to me about his company management - apparently someone in management discovered that PostgresDB is a real good database and free, and so they authorised the IT department to migrate their application from Oracle Cloud to PostgresDB as it will "save a lot of money" (true, but...). However, they aren't willing to shell out for the commercial solutions (like EnterpriseDB, which would be still a lot cheaper than Oracle), and are insisting that the team also recreate "all and every" feature that Oracle DB has and is used by their application, but is lacking in PostgresDB - after all, "If Oracle can do it, why can't you!?".

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

#109

Post by estimator7292 »

wordpad wrote: post #48
_bypa wrote: post #16

The 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.

Depends 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.

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