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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

#141

Post by AlexandrB »

ryandrake wrote: post #17

Not 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 wonder where in business school they teach you to "measure inputs and try to maximize them", because that's basically what's happening.

Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks

#142

Post by aspensmonster »

mrandish wrote: post #83
dominotw wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i call BS on this story

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

>This article is about statistics and government policy. For Nazi analogies in internet discussions, see Godwin's law.

Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks

#143

Post by thereisnospork »

MrCharismatist wrote: post #98
Our_Benefactors wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You've used AI to do something that was a single command Yes, and that’s a good thing! This is in fact where a lot of AI value lies. You dont need to know that command anymore - knowing the functional contract is now sufficient to perform the requisite work duties. This is huge!

Look, I feel for junior admins, I was one 35 years ago and the only reason I'm where I am today was because I had to learn the hard way, repeatedly and often. I use the shit out of opencode to do things as a force multiplier, not as a way to keep me from knowing what its doing. The point at which we're optimizing for "we don't need to know that anymore" is the point at which everything blows up, because agentic work…

Replace agent with 'direct report' and you've just described middle management. For better or worse, companies have always run on non deterministic tasks doled out by persons who barely understand the work.

Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks

#144

Post by pjmlp »

laweijfmvo wrote: post #63

I 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'…

Enterprise consulting here, it is getting ridiculous, with forced trainings, workshops and hacktons to motivate use of AI in daily activities.

Stuff that could be easily done as shell scripts gets asked how could we make an agent out of it.

Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks

#145

Post by xp84 »

ryandrake wrote: post #17

Not 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…

Even as a very happy NVDA shareholder I agree with you. It's comical that managers are being so naïve as to think that you can crap out a dashboard of "tokens consumed per week" and get any useful signal at all from it, beyond learning who's not using AI.

Incompetent use of a coding agent, or just general shenanigans, can burn tokens all day but it's not going to get tickets done.

Just looking at the work output - how many story points, tickets, how many new bugs are opened, etc. has not become any less relevant a metric for productivity with AI. If you're a skilled and proper user of AI those numbers would be changing in the right direction, compared to before you had it.

Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks

#146

Post by krupan »

So we've seen sellers of AI hardware invest in AI software companies to create demand for their hardware. Now we are seeing AI (and/or AI adjacent) companies requiring their employees to use AI to create demand for AI. When does this snake finish eating its own tail?

Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks

#147

Post by 0xy »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #110
andrethegiant wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't know where you're working but LLM enhanced development has skyrocketed our rate of feature development. As an example, a project roadmapped to take 7 months was delivered in only 4.5 because of CC/Codex.

I'm confused how anyone could believe it isn't an enhancer, unless they have refused to use any of the technologies.

Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks

#149

Post by monkaiju »

philipallstar wrote: post #70
Qem wrote: post #68

It's a shame AI now has a universal basic jobs[1] program, but humans still not. Companies are paying AI to dig holes, so other AI can fill them. [1] https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-full-employment/

We didn't. The USSR had 100% employment long ago[0], and all the poverty that goes with it. This isn't like that, as it isn't funded through taxes. This is private companies experimenting with their money, and risking downstream cost increases that may cause people to go elsewhere, as they do when they try anything new. This is much better than just funding people regardless of productivity through forced taxes. [0]…

> as it isn't funded through taxes

This is simply not true, especially when you consider the massive amounts of government support so many parts of this "experiment with their own money" is getting. As a Utah resident its extremely evident in how forcefully they're pushing through what will be one of the largest datacenters in the world despite near universal disapproval from the citizens.

Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks

#150

Post by pjmlp »

pjc50 wrote: post #21

Lots 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.

No worries, we keep drinking from paper straws, because that is what really matters.

The problem with not burning tokens is when you not meet the performance KPIs, get labelled as luddite and off you go, even before the job gets taken over by AI.

I do agree with the sentiment, that and war mongers destroying the planet.

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