Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 268 posts

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

#151

Post by ddtaylor »

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #34
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.…

How you burn 300 requests in a day? From my Copilot usage Opus consumes surprisingly few requests to do a lot of stuff. It isn’t paying by token but instead by prompt or something.

Copilot charges a 27X multiplier on Opus 4.7 prompts.

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

#152

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

themafia wrote: post #140
this_user wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> engage with AI as much as possible simply to explore what is actually possible "Research" isn't part of my job title. If you don't know what's possible then why are you deploying it? You should be telling _me_ what's possible. I mean, you _paid_ for it, how can you possibly not know what you were getting? > in the expectation that you might learn something useful that will be more valuable in the long run. "I'll ta…

Hear hear.

An overly generous steelman in my opinion as well. Have 10% of your employees focus on finding ways to properly leverage the new technology - don’t pressure 100% of your employees with bull shit metrics.

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

#153

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

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.

No, it's literally because some dumb manager read a blog where an influencer said that you ain't a real AI native and ain't worth shit unless your developers are spending $XXXX on tokens each day.

It's that simple.

(Never mind that these bloggers are just writing ad copy for cloud providers.)

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

#154

Post by babypuncher »

_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.

Most productivity metrics are stupid, vain attempts at avoiding doing real management work. If you are actually interfacing with your subordinates regularly, as managers should, it will be obvious who is pulling their weight and who isn't, no need for arbitrary statistics that are easily gamed.

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

#155

Post by Ifkaluva »

traderj0e wrote: post #82
guyzero wrote: post #76

Once you have a score, you have a game. Once you have a game, people will do whatever it takes to win.

I don't think you need to win this, you just need to not be near the bottom of the board. But just in case, I spam tokens like it's the Chuck E Cheese roulette game.

i think the best in this case is to be solidly in the middle of the pack. don't want to be near the bottom, don't want to be a tall poppy when the backlash comes

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

#156

Post by Leynos »

retinaros wrote: post #116
morelandjs wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The trouble is, it's here now, and it wasn't before.

That may be an enterprise saas is shit problem, but I'm just happy that my employer now has a wiki search that works.

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

#157

Post by antod »

coredog64 wrote: post #84
nextlevelwizard wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How you burn 300 requests in a day? From my Copilot usage Opus consumes surprisingly few requests to do a lot of stuff. It isn’t paying by token but instead by prompt or something.

Opus 4.7 has a 7.5x multiplier when it's used from Copilot. Falling back to 4.6 it's only 3.5x

It recently went up to 15x in our org.

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

#158

Post by antod »

theblazehen wrote: post #75
nextlevelwizard wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How you burn 300 requests in a day? From my Copilot usage Opus consumes surprisingly few requests to do a lot of stuff. It isn’t paying by token but instead by prompt or something.

300 prompts in a day isn't that unreasonable to achieve on a heavy day? And Opus has a significant multiplier as well

Yeah, thats 20 Opus 4.7 prompts.

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

#159

Post by 01100011 »

asdev wrote: post #35

People who don't code(management, leadership) think AI will 10x the company but it's really a 40-60% boost. But engineers have to feign adopting this tools in fear of layoffs

What's funny to me is the seeming lack of AI usage among management despite so much of their work being amenable to AI acceleration.

At my company(big name, AI beneficiary), middle management seems to mostly be concerned with shuffling chairs on the deck of the Titanic while they wait for their stock to fully vest. There is very little interest in improving anything, just an obsession with risk avoidance and performative sideshows whenever upper management wonders why execution is so poor.

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

#160

Post by red_admiral »

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.

Are the people engaging though, or are they telling the AI "go do some busywork" and then minimizing that window and getting on with their job?
Post reply on HN