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Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools

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Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools

#111

Post by jaggederest »

mikepurvis wrote: post #37
jaggederest wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there are two motivations that get blurred pretty quickly: a) you find a particular context that executes well and want to preserve parts of it or not have to repeat explanations b) you want to continue a session so you don't have to rebuild the context from scratch I think A is something where it's totally reasonable to preserve pieces as part of like a prompt library or equivalent, or directory-specific age…

I think the answer for both cases is supposed to be finishing a "good" session with "based on what you've learned about this project, please update the CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md/README.md files." Ideally that replaces the back and forth cycle of it's this, no it's that, it's that for reasons XYZ with a single ingestible blob that gets the agent up to speed.

I've actually had mixed results with that without some manual curation - sometimes by the time a session has gone on for a while (heaven forbid it go through multiple compactions), the agent has so much extraneous/incorrect context for docs that it can't write documentation effectively.

Sometimes it's better to dump context incrementally, reinitialize the agent with a subset of the context, or manually prime it, then ask it to write documentation as a focused task.

Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools

#112

Post by consp »

birdsongs wrote: post #97
oytis wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 40-60% boost Where? What industry, what kind of projects? The only one where I can imagine it to be true is vulnerability research, and I imagine all the low-hanging fruit to be picked soon

Mine, easily. Senior (near staff) level embedded engineering. It will spin up a boilerplate uboot or BSP config no problem. I still go in and manually check and add peripherals, but opus 4.7 is terrifyingly smart. Need to modify or add a new peripheral, it's there no problem. Or in a bare metal project, I can point it at an STM32 cubemx starter repo and ask for a feature (set up the ADC on pins 4 and 7, ask me for pa…

> I can point it at an STM32 cubemx starter repo and ask for a feature

My experience is it will attempt read from the wrong memory block resulting in garbadge. But that's a while ago so maybe LLMs have gotten better.

Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools

#113

Post by Zak »

cousinbryce wrote: post #101
wordpad wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on what they're trying to incentivise. It's quite possible they aren't trying to measure performance but are literally just trying to increase token consumption to feed the bubble and hype. Plus pressure employees may find new unique use cases for AI. It's like if your goal is inflation, you give out tons of money and as long as its spent, you achieve your goal.

I would guess they are trying to maximize training data

If I was being rewarded for using more tokens, I would feed LLM output back into the model. That's probably not very useful training data.

Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools

#114

Post by tandr »

thisislife2 wrote: post #108
Argonaut998 wrote: post #29

I swear the industry is being Garry Tanned. Senior management let go our localisation staff. Now they want us to use AI to translate. They still want manual review. We use Github Copilot at work, we get a measly 300 requests with the budget to go over if necessary. Opus 4.7 or GPT 5.5 would eat all of those up in a day. Are we supposed to be using more than the allotted amount, do management see that as a good thing.…

It's just not with AI though. It's who they get their advise from. One of my friend was cribbing to me about his company management - apparently someone in management discovered that PostgresDB is a real good database and free, and so they authorised the IT department to migrate their application from Oracle Cloud to PostgresDB as it will "save a lot of money" (true, but...). However, they aren't willing to shell out…

Wow... How (in)competent is his management??? "If Oracle can do it"... in 25 years with 1k devs...

Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools

#115

Post by HDThoreaun »

_bypa wrote: post #16

The fact that management signed off on measuring AI use through token usage shows how incompetent management really is, including in allegedly technical conmpanies like Amazon. Tokenmaxxing was an entirely expected and rational response. IOW You measure employees in stupid ways, you're going to get stupid behaviour as a consequence.

Or maybe they plan to review how effective high usage engineers have been next cycle and the tokenmaxxers will get bit in the ass when they have little to show for all their wasted tokens? Performance metrics can, and do, change on a dime and tokenmaxxing seems short sighted when management can look at old logs.

Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools

#116

Post by retinaros »

morelandjs wrote: post #85
retinaros wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you list us some of the capabilities you use that bring value besides “summarize my email”

Yes, we can crawl our entire internal documentation via LLM. Want to know if someone is already working in the space of your latest idea? Ask Claude, it hits the internal search APIs and finds docs and references directly relevant to your query. There are a lot of separate document stores so this took a lot of effort previously. I can also query Slack, Outlook, etc. I don’t understand the cynicism in your comment.

That is a summarize my wiki. Nice search feature.

Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools

#118

Post by esafak »

suzzer99 wrote: post #99
asdfman123 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

40% boost for smart engineers, for now. People churning out slop is slowing me down and the full effects of it won't be felt for a while.

Yesterday, I had my first experience of a mid-level dev stuck on a problem, coming to me with Codex and Copilot summaries of what those tools thought the problem was, which turned out to be completely off-base. Codex was pretty sure something was wrong with the response object being returned by the endpoint in question. It turned out there was a conversion method applied to the endpoint response, which mutated its in…

Are you sure he was capable of debugging it before?

Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools

#119

Post by johnbarron »

_bypa wrote: post #16

The fact that management signed off on measuring AI use through token usage shows how incompetent management really is, including in allegedly technical conmpanies like Amazon. Tokenmaxxing was an entirely expected and rational response. IOW You measure employees in stupid ways, you're going to get stupid behaviour as a consequence.

This is Matt Garman, the ultimate MBA. Bonus for sure tied to tokens-per-quarter, which is the 2026 equivalent of measuring engineers by lines of code...

This why AWS is bleeding good engineers for years. What is left is starting to look like Boeing post McDonnell merger...

They took out a quarter of their documentation page limited real estate, with AI doc shorts nobody asked for, nobody needs, and cant disable.

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