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

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

#141

Post by nophunphil »

tverbeure wrote: post #135
the_snooze wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My questions for that approach are: Why treat AI as a special technology that needs enterprise-scale exploration to come up with a useful application? And why not take the alternative approach of identifying the subset of people who have indeed found solid uses and spread their best practices around? The top-down approach to encouraging (mandating?) AI usage strikes me as infantilizing to the workers, who are perfect…

Human nature? In the early nineties, it was common for experienced electrical engineers to keep on using schematic entry digital design and look down on RTL and synthesis tools, despite that fact the latter was already way more productive. At some point, management had to put their foot down and force everyone to switch to using synthesis. It's not unreasonable to assume that many people are set in their ways and unw…

I guess the only difference between this and your example is the concrete efficiency gain from RTL and synthesis tools versus dubious applications of AI. I do agree with the second point about pushing people to explore new ways of doing things though.

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

#142

Post by Terr_ »

koolba wrote: post #47
_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.

Management 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).

Sounds 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

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

#145

Post by aerodexis »

this_user wrote: post #102
_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.

in this instance - it seems like Amazon employees are wasting money exploring ways to waste money.

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

#146

Post by jjice »

oytis wrote: post #56
asdev wrote: post #35

People 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

> 40-60% boost Where? What industry, what kind of projects? The only one where I can imagine it to be true is vulnerability research, and I imagine all the low-hanging fruit to be picked soon

I work on an ETL platform and it definitely is a huge boost in certain things, but a drain in others.

We started working on a new product a few months ago and it's really dangerous up front on an empty code base. It can quickly write more code than you can comfortably understand. The more serious danger is when three people are all doing that at once. I had to bring this up at meetings and try to get a better review culture going.

Now that we're a few months in and changes are more targeted additions to an existing system we're happy with, it's _huge_ (which has been my experience on our existing product). I can drop a brief paragraph I speech-to-texted into my agent, give it a general starting place (where I imagine the issue/feature extension point is), and then tell it to do some research and propose a change. I'd guess it's about 50% of the time that I have to update it's implementation plan. Then I let it run (my favorite is setting this up before a meeting) and come back. Then we have to review the code and go from there.

Definitely a 50%+ speed up in some cases, but not all. It's also great for problems that procrastinating, as it reduces friction so much.

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

#148

Post by _fizz_buzz_ »

_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.

I have recently played around with lots of data from measurements and one can totally dump everything into context and let Claude try to analyze data that way. It burns through a lot of tokens. It is smarter to save data to disk and let Claude write scripts that handles/analyzes the data. It’s much faster and the results are much better and you save a lot of tokens. But I guess Amazon prefers the first approach.

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

#149

Post by mlvljr »

_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.

[dead]

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

#150

Post by tverbeure »

nophunphil wrote: post #141
tverbeure wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human nature? In the early nineties, it was common for experienced electrical engineers to keep on using schematic entry digital design and look down on RTL and synthesis tools, despite that fact the latter was already way more productive. At some point, management had to put their foot down and force everyone to switch to using synthesis. It's not unreasonable to assume that many people are set in their ways and unw…

I guess the only difference between this and your example is the concrete efficiency gain from RTL and synthesis tools versus dubious applications of AI. I do agree with the second point about pushing people to explore new ways of doing things though.

> dubious applications of AI

Leaving aside the ethical aspects of using AI (not because they're not valid, because they're off topic for this discussion), in my line of work, the capabilities and productivity improvement of AI are staggering. Most of it is not writing the new code, which is but a small part of chip design, but everything else.

I can't give a concrete work example, but here is an experiment that I ran a month ago. https://tomverbeure.github.io/2026/04/12/AMIQ-License-Key-Ge.... If it can do that, it's not hard to imaging similar use cases related to root causing complex simulation failures. It is frighteningly good at that.

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