Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools • Hacker News Board

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

#231

Post by tverbeure » Wed, May 13, 2026, 2:54 AM UTC

thesz wrote: post #210

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…

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…

In the early nineties, standard cell design was already used by everyone except those who needed clock speed at all cost.

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

#232

Post by simulator5g » Wed, May 13, 2026, 3:36 AM UTC

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.

This is induced demand for AI to justify building more datacenters, which will bring AI costs down, and the idea is that will eventually bring demand up organically.

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

#233

Post by [deleted] » Wed, May 13, 2026, 3:39 AM UTC

nzealand wrote: post #207

Handy-Man wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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$

[deleted]

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

#234

Post by kqr » Wed, May 13, 2026, 5:21 AM UTC

_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 this were the end of the story, that would be a correct interpretation of the situation.

At Amazon, something like this is likely a closely watched experiment. They knew it would incentivise waste. But they don't know what the other effects will end up being. Nobody knows -- this thread is full of loose speculation. So Amazon runs the experiment and collects the data.

----

The annoying thing about goals and incentives is that they can either be phrased in terms of input metrics (behaviours within our control) of output metrics (the outcomes we want). Input metrics are bad because they lead to skewed incentives and gaming the metrics. Output metrics are bad because they're largely affected by chance and external circumstances. (This indeed means a goal cannot be SMART on its own, because A and R are typically in tension.)

Amazon knows this. Their WBR structure is essentially about trying to set goals and targets for input metrics, and then carefully observing how input metrics correlate with output metrics. They're using a semi-scientific process to tease out the causal structure of their business. I would assume this token target is followed very closely to learn exactly what its effects are on output metrics that drive revenue and cost.

For more on this, I thnk the best public writing is Carr's Working Backwards and Chin has written about it on Commoncog too.

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

#235

Post by raxxorraxor » Wed, May 13, 2026, 5:30 AM UTC

_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.

Agreed. You really should replace the manger that made that policy as soon as possible. This is a playbook example of the corporate rot that leads to decline in a once innovative space.

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

#236

Post by raxxorraxor » Wed, May 13, 2026, 5:34 AM UTC

kqr wrote: post #234

_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 this were the end of the story, that would be a correct interpretation of the situation. At Amazon, something like this is likely a closely watched experiment. They knew it would incentivise waste. But they don't know what the other effects will end up being. Nobody knows -- this thread is full of loose speculation. So Amazon runs the experiment and collects the data. ---- The annoying thing about goals and incent…

I don't think this strategy is a viable experiment. Far too many uncontrolled variables for a very shallow complexity of "input variables" how you call it.

Simpler explanation management has no ideas and goals and this is a replacement strategy. Because they too are affected by "experimental metrics" to a degree, but that doesn't excuse this trite "science".

Any "answer" this would provide wouldn't be of higher quality than this speculation.

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

#237

Post by numpad0 » Wed, May 13, 2026, 5:40 AM UTC

_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 thought that, managers are employees to the corporate too, they're themselves measured and they need proof of work to get paid just like campus janitors.

If a manager or a manager's workforce under it just sat around and ignored AI just because it's stupid and irrelevant and useless, they lose one tool to justify their existence amongst their peers who do not express such views. If they sat around and did their jobs as-before WHILE "investing" on tokenmaxxing, they gain a double dip-able vanity metric like "we spent 12.34 quadrillion tokens last quarter" plus "our new method helped us reduce token count by 10^24 this quarter".

You may call it a fraudulent behavior from a hypothetical shareholder's perspective in this hypothetical scenario, which it is, and call it Goodhart's law scenario too, which it also is, but it's a completely normalized behavior in relative terms. Project Hail Mary is a lighthearted work of fiction.

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

#238

Post by baxtr » Wed, May 13, 2026, 6:20 AM UTC

duxup wrote: post #229

baxtr wrote: post #32

“Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.” ― Charlie Munger

Goodhart's law

Akshually… I’d say they’re not the same but related. Goodhart’s is a corollary of Charlie Munger’s quote.

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

#239

Post by aitchnyu » Wed, May 13, 2026, 7:12 AM UTC

kixiQu wrote: post #92

Amazon is big and inconsistent enough that "somewhere in Amazon, is occurring" is statistically true, no matter how nutso-sounding your .

Can we have a list of AWS services which use formal methods and general sanity so I can avoid the other 500 half baked ones?

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

#240

Post by blitzar » Wed, May 13, 2026, 9:47 AM UTC

the_snooze wrote: post #125

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.

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…

googles 20% project time was a good thing, sadly they dont even seem to do it anymore. for the bulk of corporate workers this brief period of time where they get to play an ai token game is the only break from generating TPS reports all day long.