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

arstechnica.com

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

#121

Post by suzzer99 »

esafak wrote: post #118
suzzer99 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, eventually. Largely because he would have written all the code that got to that point and had a mental model of the entire flow instead of it being a gray box.

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

#122

Post by HDThoreaun »

consp wrote: post #112
birdsongs wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The AI labs have all released at least 3 new models each since december, things move very quickly.

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

#123

Post by johnbarron »

thinkling wrote: post #98
jkingsbery wrote: post #63

I work at Amazon (standard disclaimer: just sharing my own experience, not an official spokesperson, etc.) I can't say that this isn't happening, but at least the parts of the company I get visibility into, what the article describes isn't my experience. There is a lot of interest in using GenAI, but people are mostly getting kudos around creative uses for GenAI, not just for raw amount of tokens. For most scaled Gen…

Thanks for the inside insight. I'm surprised how few comments are written with the prior that Amazon managers aren't stupid or uninformed about how incentives work. My guess would be that someone created the leaderboard without a lot of consultation with managers, and that some employees feel a competitive urge to try to "win" the leaderboard by burning tokens.

Your comment is the equivalent of stating, that Jeff Bezos and Andy Jassy, do not really know their employees are carrying around urine bottles.

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

#124

Post by shimman »

jkingsbery wrote: post #63

I work at Amazon (standard disclaimer: just sharing my own experience, not an official spokesperson, etc.) I can't say that this isn't happening, but at least the parts of the company I get visibility into, what the article describes isn't my experience. There is a lot of interest in using GenAI, but people are mostly getting kudos around creative uses for GenAI, not just for raw amount of tokens. For most scaled Gen…

Amazon is a massive company, your single experience is worse than an anecdote because there is no way verify.

What we can verify is how how Amazon already treats workers, they will surveil anyone within their systems regardless of the futility of said surveillance. Why are we suppose to not believe them using LLM systems as a means to further control their expensive employees from unionizing or seeking out solidarity with fellow workers? All LLMs do is enable tyrannical managers more power to hold over other workers, said workers are forced to engage in self alienation for fear of losing your job or forcing to do meaningless work as that is what's being tracked (and what LLMs excel at producing).

Hardly a good proposition for any worker.

I'm sorry but I fully do not believe you. This is a company that fires workers for taking too long of a bathroom break where said workers piss in bottles for fear of getting fired and you're going "hey guys, it's not too bad. Only some workers get whipped, others don't!"

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

#125

Post by the_snooze »

this_user wrote: post #102
_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.

One argument I have heard in favour of this is that management knew this would be a side effect, but that it's more important to have people engage with AI as much as possible simply to explore what is actually possible. You are effectively knowingly wasting money in the expectation that you might learn something useful that will be more valuable in the long run.

My questions for that approach are: Why treat AI as a special technology that needs enterprise-scale exploration to come up with a useful application? And why not take the alternative approach of identifying the subset of people who have indeed found solid uses and spread their best practices around?

The top-down approach to encouraging (mandating?) AI usage strikes me as infantilizing to the workers, who are perfectly capable of choosing which tools they use and when.

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

#126

Post by shimman »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #122
consp wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The AI labs have all released at least 3 new models each since december, things move very quickly.

Yeah, the industry has no issues selling $5 bills for $1. Why is this a good thing for society again? That the public subsidizes VC to no shared gains?

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

#128

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

amluto wrote: post #80

I, too, can easily use more tokens to achieve the same task. I can give worse prompts. I can fail to make it clear to the tools where to find the information they need. I can ask them to think hard when the don’t need to ask tell them not to think when they do need to. I can give vague, open ended instructions. I can generate code that sucks and throw it away. If I do all of this, do I get a promotion?

That sounds like too much effort. Better to have the AI write you a 20k word manifesto about how much you love your employer and then include that in the context of every request.

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

#129

Post by sarchertech »

guywithahat wrote: post #89
KyleTheDev wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is being used in performance reviews, source: recent Amazon SWE. They also use a bunch of dumb metrics like, total PRs submitted, total comments made on PRs, etc. To the point that, there are multiple heavily used internal tools to game these metrics. Eg, auto-comment LGTM on any approved PR. Thus, making the metrics even worse than they would have been prior.

> Amazon has told employees that the AI token statistics would not be used in performance evaluations. > Managers are discouraged from using token use to measure performance, according to a person familiar with the matter. Like CAD and architects, if you're not using LLM's while coding it's an issue, but Amazon is very clear that this isn't an official metric. I would believe managers know how many tokens you're usin…

>but Amazon is very clear that this isn't an official metric.

You're replying to an amazon employee who says they are being used in performance reviews, in comment thread on an article where 2 other Amazon employees say that their token usage is being tracked and they feel pressure to maximize token usage.

Do you have first hand knowledge to refute these 3 people with first hand knowledge?

The CAD thing is incredibly weird. I've never known an architect who had their CAD usage minutes tracked.

Btw I'm a big tech company and I know many people who are "token maxing". It's very common.

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

#130

Post by phainopepla2 »

birdsongs wrote: post #83
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.…

Requests are such a weird metric. We have a token limit via Copilot (unless I'm misunderstanding our setup), and most of my "features" burn 1 to 2% of my token limit per month on 4.7. But I don't admin our plan, and I'm unsure what we actually git. Vscode just gives me a percentage of tokens remaining metric. One of the weirder things about all this is how arbitrary and non objective the billing structure seems. One…

Copilot is currently based on requests (1 prompt = 1 request, with multipliers for different models). At the beginning of June the billing structure will change to just be normal API cost. Your features are going to start burning 10-20% of your token limit using 4.7
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