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
#2I've done similar at my job where management wants us to use all of our tokens before they expire. I usually set it to documentation tasks and other minor tasks just to eat up tokens.
Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks
#3Good old Goodhart's law.
https://xkcd.com/2899/
Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks
#4When a measure becomes a target....
Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks
#5When a measure becomes a target....
Especially a measure that's so easily manipulated.
Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks
#6I'd bet that the goal is for people to 'game' it though. By pushing people to use AI more they'll try it, experiment with it, 'waste' time on it ... and from that they'll learn about it. That's the end goal.
They're using tokens for pointless stuff right now in order to figure out use cases where it helps. You can't do that without also learning where it doesn't help.
My company is doing the same thing.
Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks
#7Token-driven development
Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks
#8I've done similar at my job where management wants us to use all of our tokens before they expire. I usually set it to documentation tasks and other minor tasks just to eat up tokens.
At least that nominally creates some value at the end of the day. Documentation is the thing everyone wants but no one has time/desire to create. My most recent token heavy task was having an agent write unit tests for coverage on a little graphAPI tool I'd written a bit ago to satisfy SonarQube.
Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks
#9Like six months ago we got a presentation from an AWS guy on the AI tooling available and how it fit with our particular use cases.
At one point seemingly out of nowhere he pointed out on his screen share "Look at how many tokens I've used this month. I run so much Opus." It was a number that was offensively large.
I remember thinking "That's a really odd flex, this crap is so expensive the fact that you use so much should be a red flag"
He demonstrated a number of Claude Code use cases he had to manage and tweak AWS infrastructure that made me, the old greybeard sysadmin older than the internet think "You've used AI to do something that was a single command."
So this story makes sense. They were being encouraged to just blast away at it six plus months ago.
Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks
#10When a measure becomes a target....
I was just going to invoke Goodhart's Law