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

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

#201

Post by asdfman123 »

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.

Exactly. That's the problem ICs don't want to admit.

Managing a lot of people at scale is messy and you have to use crude solutions. It's impossible to know everything that's going on.

If you were a manager you wouldn't do any better. Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.

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

#202

Post by arjie »

mrhottakes wrote: post #190
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?

Even if you don't, it's the only way to ensure adoption and most workplaces consider the lack of adoption a greater danger than a Goodharted adoption. Overall, I've observed that the US has very low barrier to starting companies so, considering companies of all sizes are doing this, if it's a mistake those startups will get beaten by the ones doing other things.

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

#203

Post by birdsongs »

ua709 wrote: post #172
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…

> 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

Yes but it's famously clunky, and if I'm already in an existing repo, a prompt will do it much, much faster.

It also generates a ton of bloat and comments.

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

#204

Post by 05 »

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…

Yeah just had Codex/Gemini write me nrf52 bootloader that fit in under 4k flash sector size with OTA and DFU support (well, app does OTA download then the bootloader validates and decompresses the image). Works best if you let them use OpenOCD on a real device, then they can iterate until it starts working.

I didn't even need that bootloader, just didn't like the fact that Adafruit one takes too much space :)

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

#205

Post by harimau777 »

retinaros wrote: post #50
morelandjs wrote: post #45

I have mixed thoughts on this. These thoughts are my own. On the one hand, it’s objectively silly to pretend like we’ve solved the age old problem of measuring developer productivity. Metric-obsessed leadership can also be intolerable, counterproductive, and it’s a good way to paint yourself into a corner undervaluing your best talent and overvaluing your mediocre talent. That said, I’m kind of having a blast using C…

Could you list us some of the capabilities you use that bring value besides “summarize my email”

A company requires a specific % of code coverage but doesn't give developers enough time to actually write tests. AI can be used to generate the tests needed to get pass the code coverage and avoid being fired for not working fast enough.

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

#206

Post by runsfromfire »

_fizz_buzz_ wrote: post #148
_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.

I have recently played around with lots of data from measurements and one can totally dump everything into context and let Claude try to analyze data that way. It burns through a lot of tokens. It is smarter to save data to disk and let Claude write scripts that handles/analyzes the data. It’s much faster and the results are much better and you save a lot of tokens. But I guess Amazon prefers the first approach.

I don’t have any specific inside knowledge about Amazon, but I would hazard a guess that the first approach also provides better training material for the LLM.

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

#207

Post by nzealand »

Handy-Man wrote: post #100
asdfman123 wrote: post #39

Saw a good joke on twitter about it. Something like: "You spent $23, over the $20 food limit. Be more careful next time. You spent $600 on tokens, $200 more than the average. Congratulations!"

https://x.com/vasuman/status/2053956365052240263 > whoever spent $600 on Anthropic last night, great job leveraging Al! But to the person who spent $23 on Uber Eats please remember our limit for food is $20 per meal

> Fake because no uber eats order is under 30$

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

#208

Post by oytis »

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.

If companies are suddenly willing to spend money on letting their staff experiment, why not let them experiment with what they want to? They probably know more about technology than you do, otherwise you wouldn't need them.

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

#209

Post by tandr »

kgwgk wrote: post #138
tandr wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow... How (in)competent is his management??? "If Oracle can do it"... in 25 years with 1k devs...

47 years if you count from the first release. But now you have this super intelligent thing that enables anyone to create a billion dollar business - you have no excuse!

"Hey Opus, create me an fully tested code base for Oracle-like DB from scratch. Don't overcomplicate it, so it should be ready with when I get back from lunch"?

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

#210

Post by thesz »

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…

Alpha 21064, 1992, was using domino logic [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domino_logic

There was no synthesis algorithms that would map VHDL or Verilog designs into domino logic elements at the time. I believe that the most work in the synthesis-to-domino-logic area was done at the beginning of current century.

So, DEC's engineers and, I think, Intel's engineers were doing work using schematics well into 21-st century.

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