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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

#181

Post by mrhottakes »

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…

Memories of me and my three developer team being told "we need to use Excel, but in a web browser. So just make an app that does everything like Excel"

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

#182

Post by traderj0e »

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.

It's 90% real where I work, which is not Amazon but is a peer company. They haven't explicitly said that tokens are used to measure performance, but when managers are posting token usage leaderboards each week with no further explanation, we take the hint.

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

#183

Post by mrhottakes »

01100011 wrote: post #159
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 performa…

At my company middle management is using Gemini to churn out reams of useless documents in lieu of anything approaching "program management" or similar

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

#184

Post by the_snooze »

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…

This is why I asked:

>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?

A bottom-up approach has a far better chance of finding those particularly good use cases, and if you lean on the people how found those fits, they're more persuasive than top-down edicts. They actually know what they're talking about. If the point is to leverage AI for better work outcomes, someone with your experience is far more valuable than "here's a dashboard, make the number go up," which seems to be what's going on at Amazon.

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

#185

Post by tverbeure »

ua709 wrote: post #177
tverbeure wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think I used Opus 4.6 1M.

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

#187

Post by ua709 »

tverbeure wrote: post #185
ua709 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think I used Opus 4.6 1M.

Thanks! I'm going to give this a shot on a nasty simulation I'm presently working on... :)

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

#188

Post by nradov »

_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.

If it's stupid and it works then it's not stupid. Sometimes executives have to use blunt instruments to turn around the culture of a hidebound large organization. When Jeff Bezos sent his 2002 API mandate it might have seemed stupid at the time and yet it worked.

https://nordicapis.com/the-bezos-api-mandate-amazons-manifes...

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

#190

Post by mrhottakes »

arjie wrote: post #103

This kind of thing is totally fine if it's being done (it's believable because Meta internally incentivized tokenmaxxing). When you're trying to change the behavior of a large number of people, only blunt instruments are available if you want to get quick outcomes. The edge cases where people Goodhart very hard are all right. You can just human-in-the-loop them away. The opportunity cost for most organizations of not…

So you're saying that if you ignore all the downsides with "you can just human in the loop them away" then it works great?
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