yesterday's front page: AI is making me dumb. today's front page: employees are making AI dumb. the circle is complete.
Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks
101–110 of 450 posts
Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks
#102Not 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…
Bragging about token usage is like bragging about LoC written.
When I was at Amazon last year, the bragging (from the AI poo-bah in my section of Amazon, note) about AI included "look at the total line count of commits from the heaviest AI users!"
So if AI screws something up and re-writes it and then screws it up again, needing another re-write, that counted as more positive than if it was done correctly, and simply, the first time.
Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks
#103I 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'…
I'm in a large-ish peer group for engineering managers. AI token over-use is a growing problem.
The problem explodes at any company that puts up a token use leaderboard or hints that they might do layoffs for engineers that refuse to use AI tools. This triggers a race to use as many tokens as possible to stay ahead.
Anecdotally, the problem is worst among devs who read a lot of social media. Twitter, Threads, Mastodon, LinkedIn, and others are filled with recycled viral stories about companies going AI-native and firing people who don't use enough AI. Anxieties are high right now so nervous developers see this and think they must burn tokens faster than their peers to avoid an inevitable culling.
Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks
#104Lots 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.
I've been noticing how our economy keeps getting more Soviet as it becomes more top-down. We basically have central planning now with all the pathologies inherent in that system, but unlike the soviets we just have a bunch of guys who happened to get rich or bribe the right people running our GOSPLAN.
The problem is that the founding fathers believed in constraining the state because it could be abusive, but they should have understood that all power ought to be subject to the people, not just state power.
Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know some that was told to try and use AI more on the job so they created some agent to just burn tokens and ended up using about 10x what the next highest employee used. Buddy expected to get shit but instead got an accolade and was asked to give a short talk to the other employees about how they could match their success.
i call BS on this story
I have seen similar at my company so it is highly plausible.
Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks
#106Has anyone actually seen true business lift from agents or is this one of those "do stupid things faster" situation?
Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks
#107Not 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…
I know some that was told to try and use AI more on the job so they created some agent to just burn tokens and ended up using about 10x what the next highest employee used. Buddy expected to get shit but instead got an accolade and was asked to give a short talk to the other employees about how they could match their success.
I believe it
Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks
#108Not 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’s preposterous, companies are blindly funding slop and the product is fool’s gold.
It's the state of modern capitalism. Money must flow from one entity to another even if nothing of tangible value is produced. The flows of money prove the growth of both businesses.
Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bragging about token usage is like bragging about LoC written.
Obligatory: Negative 2000 Lines of Code https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44381252
Versus my sibling comment to yours, I actually sent that to some internal folks after the bit about AI+total lines committed was said.
Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks
#110Not 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…
Bragging about token usage is like bragging about LoC written.
It’s honestly 10x worse than LOC. At least in the human era LOC had correlation to shipping features.
It’s more like bragging about compiler cycles spent.