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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

#261

Post by rdfs »

leoedin wrote: post #246
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is completely unreasonable to assume that. Tech people are so hungry for productivity gains that they regularly will defy management forbidding them from using a tool, because the tool is so good they feel they have to have it. If LLMs truly are as good as their proponents say, engineers will use them even if management outright forbade it. The fact that people aren't using them, and have to be forced, is extremel…

> extremely strong evidence that they are not in fact that useful. Surely you can't argue in good faith today that LLMs aren't useful? It was a valid argument a year ago, but the latest models are absolutely useful at solving whole classes of problems. They're not perfect, need to be carefully monitored, can cause weird gambling like dopamine rushes and can cause lazy development habits to creep in. But none of those…

Useful = net benefit.

Short-term, sure in some contexts. Long-term? Nobody knows yet.

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

#262

Post by nextlevelwizard »

theblazehen wrote: post #259
nextlevelwizard wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That 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

I think we use it differently then, I tend to go heavy on the back and forth. For speccing things out, I have a back-and-forth with the grill-me skill, break things down into tickets, as well as kicking off subagents. That said, I significantly overestimated the number of human messages I send. My daily 90th percentile wrt number of prompts sent is sitting at 160 queries / day and average at 97 queries / day. Ran an…

Yeah that’s not good for current Copilot usage since you are paying per request not by token

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

#263

Post by theblazehen »

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #262
theblazehen wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we use it differently then, I tend to go heavy on the back and forth. For speccing things out, I have a back-and-forth with the grill-me skill, break things down into tickets, as well as kicking off subagents. That said, I significantly overestimated the number of human messages I send. My daily 90th percentile wrt number of prompts sent is sitting at 160 queries / day and average at 97 queries / day. Ran an…

Yeah that’s not good for current Copilot usage since you are paying per request not by token

Yeah, copilot is only my backup - Codex and Claude are my primary, where it's per-token. Just looked up my user prompt count from my opencode db

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

#264

Post by AlexeyBelov »

tandr wrote: post #209
kgwgk wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

47 years if you count from the first release. But now you have this super intelligent thing that enables anyone to create a billion dollar business - you have no excuse!

"Hey Opus, create me an fully tested code base for Oracle-like DB from scratch. Don't overcomplicate it, so it should be ready with when I get back from lunch"?

You forgot "make no mistakes"

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

#265

Post by Serenacula »

_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've worked for Amazon before as a warehouse worker, I can attest they were one of the stupidest companies I've ever worked for. Stats were blindly followed to the point of absolute stupidity, performative work was enforced for the cameras, communication between staff and management and even between managers was non-existent. I once spent nearly 3 months unable to do a portion of my job because nobody knew how to buy more cardboard boxes. Not that they couldn't, but that nobody with any responsibility over the problem was able to contact anyone capable of buying them.

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

#266

Post by leoedin »

rdfs wrote: post #261
leoedin wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> extremely strong evidence that they are not in fact that useful. Surely you can't argue in good faith today that LLMs aren't useful? It was a valid argument a year ago, but the latest models are absolutely useful at solving whole classes of problems. They're not perfect, need to be carefully monitored, can cause weird gambling like dopamine rushes and can cause lazy development habits to creep in. But none of those…

Useful = net benefit. Short-term, sure in some contexts. Long-term? Nobody knows yet.

You can't just redefine useful to mean something it doesn't.

Useful = able to be used for practical purposes.

As an extreme example, most effective weapons are useful to the person using them, but aren't necessarily a net benefit.

Is AI going to make life meaningfully better for most people? That's uncertain. Is it useful for the tasks in front of me today? Yes, definitely.

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

#267

Post by nophunphil »

tverbeure wrote: post #150
nophunphil wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Fair points! Thanks for sharing the write-up as well - great read.

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

#268

Post by my-next-account »

themafia wrote: post #140
this_user wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> engage with AI as much as possible simply to explore what is actually possible "Research" isn't part of my job title. If you don't know what's possible then why are you deploying it? You should be telling _me_ what's possible. I mean, you _paid_ for it, how can you possibly not know what you were getting? > in the expectation that you might learn something useful that will be more valuable in the long run. "I'll ta…

>"Research" isn't part of my job title. If you don't know what's possible then why are you deploying it? You should be telling _me_ what's possible. I mean, you _paid_ for it, how can you possibly not know what you were getting?

Extremely weird take for a knowledge worker.

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