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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

#171

Post by guywithahat »

mrhottakes wrote: post #27
guywithahat wrote: post #4

This reads more like it's a single employees gripe than a real thing that's happening. They're not using the metrics in performance reviews, and it's a new AI tool that AWS probably wants legitimate usage data out of. That said, if you can't figure out how to use AI in a software job you should look into it. Not using AI at this point is a lot like not using CAD as an architect.

> Not using AI at this point is a lot like not using CAD as an architect. Does CAD software regularly generate an incorrect design that results in a catastrophic failure of the building?

I have never pushed incorrect code that results in catastrophic failure due to AI, are you sure you're using the tool correctly? If you didn't know what you were doing with CAD software, you could absolutely generate incorrect designs.

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

#172

Post by ua709 »

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…

> STM32 cubemx starter repo and ask for a feature

I'm confused, isn't the whole point of using the STM32CubeIDE that all the peripherals, like say setting up an ADC on pins 4 and 7, are checkbox features?

https://wiki.st.com/stm32mcu/wiki/Getting_started_with_ADC

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

#173

Post by watwut »

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.

That still sounds like a dumb strategy. Or, more likely, post hoc rationalization.

You reward me for wasting tokens and punish me for not wasting them, I will maximally waste them and wont "explore hownto make them useful". The latter wastes less tokens and that is punished.

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

#174

Post by tverbeure »

ua709 wrote: post #167
tverbeure wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> dubious applications of AI Leaving aside the ethical aspects of using AI (not because they're not valid, because they're off topic for this discussion), in my line of work, the capabilities and productivity improvement of AI are staggering. Most of it is not writing the new code, which is but a small part of chip design, but everything else. I can't give a concrete work example, but here is an experiment that I ran…

> use cases related to root causing complex simulation failures. That's a pretty interesting use case. I assume this is for RTL simulation given the thread, but how do you connect the output of the simulator to the AI?

For a small case, a colleague took a screenshot of waves in the waveform viewer and pasted it into the AI tool. It worked.

But for large cases, use tools to extract all interfaces from the waveform file and save it as a text file, or add $display statements in the Verilog itself to dump the transactions. A SOTA LLM will eat it up. You point it to the RTL, a log file with hundreds of thousands of lines, and give it a few lines to explain how it is supposed to behave. Just tell it "My simulation is hanging. Figure why." Wait 15 minutes and it will tell you why it hangs and which line to change in your code to fix it.

I've done the experiment after the fact: I had spent ~3 days to fix complicated 3 bugs. I then rolled back the code and told it "Here is the spec. Find all the bugs in this code". It found all 3 bugs in around 30 min. That's when I realized that things won't be the same anymore. (And don't get me wrong: I love debugging simulations.)

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

#175

Post by tverbeure »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #164
tverbeure wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human nature? In the early nineties, it was common for experienced electrical engineers to keep on using schematic entry digital design and look down on RTL and synthesis tools, despite that fact the latter was already way more productive. At some point, management had to put their foot down and force everyone to switch to using synthesis. It's not unreasonable to assume that many people are set in their ways and unw…

It is completely unreasonable to assume that. Tech people are so hungry for productivity gains that they regularly will defy management forbidding them from using a tool, because the tool is so good they feel they have to have it. If LLMs truly are as good as their proponents say, engineers will use them even if management outright forbade it. The fact that people aren't using them, and have to be forced, is extremel…

> extremely strong evidence that they are not in fact that useful

See my other reply in this subthread. For my line of work, they are in fact ridiculously useful.

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

#176

Post by pfannkuchen »

_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.

So my assessment of the current mania is that it’s basically a management variant of Pascal’s wager.

If you as a “leader” refuse to go along with the crowd and you’re right, then after the dust settles you look like someone who guessed right. Oh and now we’re in a recession so you are probably having a bad time regardless. You maybe get one promotion, congratulations.

If you refuse to go along with the crowd and you’re wrong, you look like a Luddite, you probably got fired at some point along the way and your judgement reputation is hurt.

If you do go along with the crowd and the crowd is wrong, you are just in the same boat as everyone else. You are probably about the same as if you went against the crowd and you were right, possibly even better because it can take awhile to be proven right and you could be hurt in the middle.

So, I think, once something like this picks up enough steam, it’s just logical on a per individual basis for everyone to go along with it, regardless of how they feel about it internally.

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

#177

Post by ua709 »

tverbeure wrote: post #174
ua709 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> use cases related to root causing complex simulation failures. That's a pretty interesting use case. I assume this is for RTL simulation given the thread, but how do you connect the output of the simulator to the AI?

For a small case, a colleague took a screenshot of waves in the waveform viewer and pasted it into the AI tool. It worked. But for large cases, use tools to extract all interfaces from the waveform file and save it as a text file, or add $display statements in the Verilog itself to dump the transactions. A SOTA LLM will eat it up. You point it to the RTL, a log file with hundreds of thousands of lines, and give it a…

SOTA = State of the Art? Like say Claude Opus 4.5? I actually want to try this out.

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

#178

Post by watwut »

tverbeure wrote: post #135
the_snooze wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 perfect…

Human nature? In the early nineties, it was common for experienced electrical engineers to keep on using schematic entry digital design and look down on RTL and synthesis tools, despite that fact the latter was already way more productive. At some point, management had to put their foot down and force everyone to switch to using synthesis. It's not unreasonable to assume that many people are set in their ways and unw…

> It's not unreasonable to assume that many people are set in their ways and unwilling to change their behavior without a bit of a push.

You include those only in second round along with guidelines and recommendations on how to use it effectively.

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

#179

Post by randycupertino »

_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.

> You measure employees in stupid ways, you're going to get stupid behaviour as a consequence.

I worked for a healthcare tech startup that made everyone wear fitbits and you got cheaper health insurance premiums if you averaged a higher # of steps every day. People were putting their fitbits on drillbits and whirring them around to log like 20,000 steps a day.

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

#180

Post by traderj0e »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #42

> They said the move reflected pressure to adopt the technology after Amazon introduced targets for more than 80 percent of developers to use AI each week, and earlier this year began tracking AI token consumption on internal leader boards. This measuring of tokenmaxxing as a proxy for something beneficial to the company has got to be the single dumbest thing I have ever heard of in my entire software career. It woul…

They used to measure loc, but this is even dumber than that. The charitable explanation is they just want to make sure nobody is completely avoiding AI use.
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