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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

#81

Post by antonvs »

Centigonal wrote: post #16
kotaKat wrote: post #8

Sidebar: I love how Amazon basically gave up on AWS Chime for Slack. Even dogfooding their own messaging product didn't work.

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.

> I know there are good product people inside Amazon

For UI though? I mainly use the shopping site, AWS, and Prime Video, but none of those are productivity-style apps, which need to have less basic workflows to be competitive. Can you name any successful Amazon apps along those lines?

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

#82

Post by watermelon0 »

kotaKat wrote: post #8

Sidebar: I love how Amazon basically gave up on AWS Chime for Slack. Even dogfooding their own messaging product didn't work.

Unless something has changed recently, Slack uses AWS Chime SDK for audio/video, so at least the core technology is great.

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

#83

Post by siva7 »

tyingq wrote: post #59
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…

Would be really curious what the internal market share for Kiro is. Not a really good look for it if it's just smattering use here and there.

It's the worst harness i ever used. And they are selling it like crazy to all their enterprise customers who don't know any better. A true money printer at this point.

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

#84

Post by nijave »

Centigonal wrote: post #16
kotaKat wrote: post #8

Sidebar: I love how Amazon basically gave up on AWS Chime for Slack. Even dogfooding their own messaging product didn't work.

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.

Imo a lot of AWS products are garbage. Their key competency is making technical products for technical users from scratch given concrete requirements

All the "we built it so we could say we have it in sales meetings" stuff is pretty bad

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

#85

Post by nijave »

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.)

On one hand, they don't want to piss off all their employees with big brother culture.

To some extent, it's less offensive to mock your own stuff the bigger you are. In my limited big corp experience, everything was so big and convoluted it was never anyone's fault (150 teams worked on ) something sucked and there were always 25 more teams working to fix it anyway. In some ways, it was actually helpful because people would stay engaged trying to improve things "on a big scale"

Suppressing systematic issues makes it easy to carve out a niche pretending to look useful while doing nothing (which is ultimately a waste of money)--big corp already have plenty of those

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

#86

Post by compiler-guy »

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.)

Even before the internet, employees were making these kinds of criticisms at lunch, at the water cooler and during their car pools.

If the company forbids it on visible internal channels, it will just pop up on external, private channels. With less corporate control and less corporate visibility and more leaks.

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

#87

Post by apparent »

davidwritesbugs wrote: post #78
apparent wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, my horse broke down so I've been stuck at the farm.

You have a /horse/?! Well laadeedaa

It is funny how things that were completely ordinary 100 years ago are now considered luxury items. I suppose it's because they're used for leisure instead of as work horses/transportation, and because feeding/housing/mucking is now a burden for city/suburban dwellers.

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

#88

Post by mrbonner »

cmiles8 wrote: post #32

Amazon’s attempts at AI tooling are just far too behind to be taken seriously. Kiro, Quick whatever, the Alexa updates. All just a hot mess. Amazon’s own employees appear to have abandoned Kiro en mass when allowed to just use Claude. Amazon should just focus on being a utility compute provider. Anything they try to do on top of that is just consistently second rate.

Then how do they get promoted?

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

#89

Post by burger_moon »

burger_moon wrote: post #68

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…

Oof hit a nerve with the jeffbots on this but it doesn’t change the fact that everyone is laughing when you know the layoffs are predictably coming in with each earnings call.

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

#90

Post by computomatic »

fg137 wrote: post #76
computomatic wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s all relative. Kiro is second to Claude Code, but Amazon isn’t really competing with Anthropic. They need something better than Microsoft/Github Copilot and that is a low, low bar.

> They need something better than Microsoft/Github Copilot Why? What's wrong with using Claude Code/Codex?

Enterprise GTM for these behemoths relies on offering everything a customer needs so they don’t shop around. It’s Microsoft’s playbook and AWS copies it for the same market. That’s why they each offer a “good enough” (but objectively garbage) solution for everything under the sun.
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