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Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks

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Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks

#211

Post by crabbone »

swatcoder wrote: post #165
dkarl wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I kind of get what they're thinking in trying to make sure all engineers use AI. For myself, and for the engineers working with me, I saw everyone go through an initial aversion and resistance to AI, and then an instant productivity boost when we started using them. So there's definitely a good reason to get everybody to start using AI. You don't want a good engineer resisting AI indefinitely if you know it will make…

It's worth reflecting on why it's so hard to convince hold outs to discover how AI might help them. The fundamental issue is that there really aren't many convincing demonstrations that hold outs can relate to and there remains basically no evidence of real value gained. Users attest to higher productivity and point to material but intermediate factors like token use, generated lines of code, pr counts, etc, but ther…

Here's one selling factor from the experience I'm experiencing right now:

Others will use AI, and it will make your life miserable. You need to know enough about AI to be able to fight back.

The experience: one employee, self-selected, assigned themselves to a task of configuring integration with MySQL HA deployment. They produced a mountain of code in a short month (we are talking about close to a hundred thousands lines of Python code). And they decided to go with Oracle's tools, instead of Galera...

Everything this employee produces is, quite obviously, AI-generated. Also, in the initial stages, they worked on their project completely alone: no reviews. To give some sense of size of this insanity: one of the configuration scripts I'm working with now is a 9K+ loc of Python that's supposed to run from `mysqlsh`. About half of it is module-level variables.

It will take many months to restructure this "prototype" by hand. It's a pain to read and to navigate. GitLab UI has a perceivable lag just trying to display the script, forget about diffs. I will absolutely need AI to try to make sense of it (I'm not allowed to fix it). But, and if it ever comes to fixing, I can't imagine this to be done without automation of some sort.

Unfortunately, AI generates problems that, sometimes, only AI can fix. :(

Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks

#212

Post by xiaoyu2006 »

> Amazon employees are reportedly using the company’s new internal AI tool, MeshClaw, to create extraneous AI agents—not to increase productivity, but to drive up AI activity.

Every time I see "not... but..." I suspect an AI article. Not sure if this is the case here.

Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks

#213

Post by wahnfrieden »

wolvoleo wrote: post #186
wahnfrieden wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's too bad that they go with a safe enterprise option that is so deficient that the outcomes will be bad and lots of people will learn useless lessons that don't translate to state of the art tools and usage patterns

Yes agreed. It's actually the office version of copilot which isn't much to write home about. Apparently the github one is more useful for its target audience.

The GitHub one is trash

Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks

#214

Post by dranudin »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #172
mrbungie wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't know how to reconcile these reports with what other people say about GenAI-agentic assisted engineering being the only way of working nowadays, especially in startups. Probably there is no dichotomy going on and it depends on multiple factors, but it seems so weird to see reports that are so different between each other.

I think GenAI-agentic assisted engineering is the only way of working nowadays, and it's the only way I personally have worked for months. I still think that an outright majority of presentations on AI tooling I've seen have been in the nonsensical "Look how many tokens I can burn" genre. Had to sit through one guy recently who explained why you need a complex agentic team with 6 different roles in order to ask Claud…

A guy at my company (very old company, we need to maintain our software for 30+ years) gave a presentation about how they used opus 4.6 to onboard people, like giving new team members access rights etc. Then another guy (even higher in management) proposed using a team of agents for that.. It's getting pretty wild

Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks

#215

Post by ZeroGravitas »

pjmlp wrote: post #150
pjc50 wrote: post #21

Lots of people reporting their "I had to use up my tokens, so I burned them on worthless stuff" stories. Incredible thing to do in a climate emergency. Push harder guys, maybe we can hit 3C warming? This reminds me of the story of how the USSR nearly made whales extinct to meet a quota for whale meat that nobody wanted to eat.

No worries, we keep drinking from paper straws, because that is what really matters. The problem with not burning tokens is when you not meet the performance KPIs, get labelled as luddite and off you go, even before the job gets taken over by AI. I do agree with the sentiment, that and war mongers destroying the planet.

What's the logic of dissing paper straws in a comment raging against war and AI as threats to the environment?

I see it a lot and assumed it was concern trolling from plastic manufacturers or libertarians funded by them but you seem genuine.

Have you just fallen for that concern trolling? Grown so cynical that nothing matters anymore? I don't understand the intention if you have a genuine desire to improve society.

What would we be doing differently in a world where we were still using plastic straws? Would that have freed up enough mental energy for a revolution? Would people be blowing up private jets while sipping their diet coke?

Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks

#216

Post by spaniard89277 »

malfist wrote: post #166
ryandrake wrote: post #17

Not just Amazon, too. It feels like all of big tech (and some smaller firms) have simultaneously gone insane. Imagine if your CEO woke up one day and told the company: "We need to encourage travel spending. Please book as many business trips as you can, and spend as much money as possible. Fly first class to our satellite offices! Take limos instead of Ubers! Eat at fine restaurants! Make sure you are constantly trav…

At my company we were told AI spend was part of perf review and that the "singularity" had happened. Now 20% of our infrastructure spend is tokens. The average number of pull requests per dev per week increased with all this spend. From 4.2 to 5.1. And that includes a huge chunk of PRs that are just agents changing a line or two in a config. It's all magical thinking

Since you're an idiot or fired if you point at this, just collect the money man.

It's their money. They want to do stupid things? So be it.

Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks

#217

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

ryandrake wrote: post #17

Not just Amazon, too. It feels like all of big tech (and some smaller firms) have simultaneously gone insane. Imagine if your CEO woke up one day and told the company: "We need to encourage travel spending. Please book as many business trips as you can, and spend as much money as possible. Fly first class to our satellite offices! Take limos instead of Ubers! Eat at fine restaurants! Make sure you are constantly trav…

People think we’re living in oh so capitalist times, why then does everything smell soviet.

Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks

#218

Post by lapetitejort »

Sharlin wrote: post #203
malfist wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At my company we were told AI spend was part of perf review and that the "singularity" had happened. Now 20% of our infrastructure spend is tokens. The average number of pull requests per dev per week increased with all this spend. From 4.2 to 5.1. And that includes a huge chunk of PRs that are just agents changing a line or two in a config. It's all magical thinking

Wow, the Singularity happened and nobody bothered to tell me about it?! Vernor Vinge and I.J. Good must be rolling in their graves fast enough to rip a hole in spacetime. Allow me to coin a term for this: Singflation.

Cory Doctorow recently published a history book on the topic [0]. Sorry you were left out. I am merely qubits floating in the void. Just finished reading Shakespeare's First Folio translated into Catalan for the tenth time. Wondering what to do next

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rapture_of_the_Nerds

Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks

#219

Post by osigurdson »

ryandrake wrote: post #17

Not just Amazon, too. It feels like all of big tech (and some smaller firms) have simultaneously gone insane. Imagine if your CEO woke up one day and told the company: "We need to encourage travel spending. Please book as many business trips as you can, and spend as much money as possible. Fly first class to our satellite offices! Take limos instead of Ubers! Eat at fine restaurants! Make sure you are constantly trav…

It seems like a natural result. People have been trying to use dashboards / metrics to roll up / indicate how well teams and individuals have been doing for a long time. Therefore, "part 1" was already in place. Now, something even easier to track is available (token usage). So, just throw token usage on the dashboard and tell people that higher is better - what other outcome would you possibly expect?

Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks

#220

Post by hirvi74 »

eunoia wrote: post #127
laweijfmvo wrote: post #63

I work at a FAANG (not Amazon), and have heard this a lot, both internally and publicly. Except, never officially from anyone that mattered (leadership). It always starts with a rumor and/or someone (internal) creating a dashboard/metric, and blows up from there. I've even heard leaders proclaim that it's NOT what they're looking at, and that you better NOT be wasting those expensive tokens. Now, they might be; they'…

Fellow FAANG. We have weekly manager meetings where leadership encourages us to increase token usage. We do push back, and leadership acknowledges that token spend is not a great metric and people are likely to game it... and then go right back to encouraging us to increase token spend in our teams. We have token tracking dashboards that leadership is looking at. I know because they show us in these manager meetings.…

I do not want FAANG and FAANG does not want me. So, as a goblin, I must ask: how is your and your team's morale doing?

People in FAANG likely worked hard to get in there or lucked out or some combination of both. I feel like my soul would be crushed if I hacked away at Leetcode for months on end just to babysit and gaslight some algorithm into asymptotically following my instructions.

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