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'Sloppenheimer:' Amazon employees mock the company's AI on Slack

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Re: 'Sloppenheimer:' Amazon employees mock the company's AI on Slack

#61

Post by TheCoelacanth »

nozzlegear wrote: post #33

I've never worked in a big corporate environment, so I'm always surprised that these companies allow employees to mock their own products/managers/bosses. (Not saying it shouldn't be allowed, just that it's surprising based on how controlling I'd expect a big corp like Amazon to be.)

It's a fool's errand to try to prevent criticism to that extent. It's mostly harmless and functions as a release valve for people's frustrations and helps to stop them from doing something more extreme than just complaining.

It's also possibly illegal to stop them. Employees in the US have a legal right to talk to each other about their working conditions and employers are not allowed to stop them. Most companies aren't above violating that law, but they want to save that for actual union-busting, not to stop people from sharing memes.

Re: 'Sloppenheimer:' Amazon employees mock the company's AI on Slack

#62

Post by dieselgate »

KyleTheDev wrote: post #18
Centigonal wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IDK how the Chime team managed to make such a garbage product. Like, somehow they managed to make something even worse than Teams with a UI that made Webex look modern. I know there are good product people inside Amazon, so IDK what combination of incentives resulted in Chime.

Genuinely, it was one of the worst parts of working at Amazon. Especially since I often interacted with people who only used Chime. Messages would be missed for weeks because they'd never check slack, or I'd never check chime. Awful experience.

Dang, that's a pretty classic dynamic. It even happens between just using a single chat app and email

Re: 'Sloppenheimer:' Amazon employees mock the company's AI on Slack

#63

Post by 8note »

gavinray wrote: post #3

I recently wound up in conversation with someone working at Amazon. Inevitably, the convo steered into AI/LLM's at some point. Here is what I learned: - AWS had an in-house LLM tool that was terrible they tried to use for a while - A lot of them still use Kiro - Claude Code is currently the de-facto standard - They're in the process of getting some custom Codex variant that doesn't phone-home and is audited approved…

assuming it hasnt changed, agent spaces is just a developer desktop running on actual aws rather than on internal hosts, and they figured out how to put vscode on it in a security approved way, including your employee credentials.

one of the things that allows is for adding mcps, skills, and various harnesses that are preconfigured to work out of the box.

i doubt its gotten out of the employee needing to sign in every couple hours

Re: 'Sloppenheimer:' Amazon employees mock the company's AI on Slack

#64

Post by pinkmuffinere »

gavinray wrote: post #3

I recently wound up in conversation with someone working at Amazon. Inevitably, the convo steered into AI/LLM's at some point. Here is what I learned: - AWS had an in-house LLM tool that was terrible they tried to use for a while - A lot of them still use Kiro - Claude Code is currently the de-facto standard - They're in the process of getting some custom Codex variant that doesn't phone-home and is audited approved…

> There's no mandated organizational standard for what exact tools to some, various teams have different levels of adoption and stacks

> No org-wide/team-wide conventions for Claude Code

Just for context, this pattern (different teams using different tools in different ways) is extremely normal within Amazon, and is intentional. These shouldn't necessarily be seen as a failure. Amazon likes to have multiple competing options they use for everything, and they constantly evaluate which option is best performing, like an A/B test. After a couple years they will pare away whatever performs worst, replacing it with a new option. This strategy definitely has it's disadvantages, but it is an intentional chosen pattern throughout the company.

Source: I worked there for 5 years, and painfully/tearfully remember the transitions chime -> slack -> teams and workdocs -> quip -> confluence :')

Re: 'Sloppenheimer:' Amazon employees mock the company's AI on Slack

#65

Post by Apocryphon »

yesitcan wrote: post #48

> I've recreated all the memes rather than share screenshots from the Slack channel in order to protect sources. 300 IQ move. Nobody will be able to trace it back to sources now.

Perhaps Kiro has yet to master reading text in images.

Re: 'Sloppenheimer:' Amazon employees mock the company's AI on Slack

#66

Post by sparrc »

gavinray wrote: post #3

I recently wound up in conversation with someone working at Amazon. Inevitably, the convo steered into AI/LLM's at some point. Here is what I learned: - AWS had an in-house LLM tool that was terrible they tried to use for a while - A lot of them still use Kiro - Claude Code is currently the de-facto standard - They're in the process of getting some custom Codex variant that doesn't phone-home and is audited approved…

I work at AWS, we got access to Claude Code very recently, most people are using Kiro and that seems to be the defacto standard.

I have not heard of any nor run into any token budgets.

There is generally a lot of team-wide usage of CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md, team-specific skills, oncall skills, etc.

Not as much org-wide, although my org has an MCP server built for helping with oncall.

Re: 'Sloppenheimer:' Amazon employees mock the company's AI on Slack

#67

Post by Ancalagon »

gavinray wrote: post #3

I recently wound up in conversation with someone working at Amazon. Inevitably, the convo steered into AI/LLM's at some point. Here is what I learned: - AWS had an in-house LLM tool that was terrible they tried to use for a while - A lot of them still use Kiro - Claude Code is currently the de-facto standard - They're in the process of getting some custom Codex variant that doesn't phone-home and is audited approved…

> There's an intenral push for something called "Agent Spaces" which was described to me as a sort of Lovable/Bolt-type thing if I understood it right

Everyone and their mother making vibe-app platforms for their company API's now

Re: 'Sloppenheimer:' Amazon employees mock the company's AI on Slack

#68

Post by burger_moon »

The non-programmers at amazon I know are all just getting onto kiro. I guess there’s two versions of kiro(?) one aimed at devs and the other more web/mcp friendly. Ic and managers are still just wading into the waters and still haven’t learned that token dashboards are snake eating its own tail endgame for these groups.

From the outside it looks like a hot mess of many competing teams trying to become the chosen one for all of Amazon’s ai use. As a result it’s a confusing mess of tools that don’t last very long and creates tons of churn and confused employees who learn new tools as they're killed.

Definitely enjoying watching the chaos unfold from a distance at these trillion dollar businesses

Re: 'Sloppenheimer:' Amazon employees mock the company's AI on Slack

#70

Post by 05 »

yesitcan wrote: post #48

> I've recreated all the memes rather than share screenshots from the Slack channel in order to protect sources. 300 IQ move. Nobody will be able to trace it back to sources now.

images/screenshots could have watermarks, recreations don't. Sources = not the people who created memes, sources here just mean people who sent the screenshots to the journalist.
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