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Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks

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Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks

#231

Post by miyoji »

Our_Benefactors wrote: post #196
miyoji wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also several hundred times more expensive.

False! Labor is the most expensive input in creating software, not joules of energy. Using AI is far far cheaper than expecting workers to synthesize all knowledge themselves.

Both workflows involve typing a very small number of characters and should take under 30 seconds. There's no difference in labor cost. However, the compute and energy costs of the tokens to solve the problem vs the tool call will be orders of magnitude in difference, even for trivial stuff like grepping. It gets worse as the problem gets more complicated and the tools more specialized.

Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks

#232

Post by drstewart »

rdedev wrote: post #156
philipallstar wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We didn't. The USSR had 100% employment long ago[0], and all the poverty that goes with it. This isn't like that, as it isn't funded through taxes. This is private companies experimenting with their money, and risking downstream cost increases that may cause people to go elsewhere, as they do when they try anything new. This is much better than just funding people regardless of productivity through forced taxes. [0]…

Right now there are state govts bending over backwards to provide cheap energy for data centers. The difference is being paid by people who live nearby through increased electricity costs. This is a tax with just extra steps

Shit, the government providing infrastructure in response to public demand? Outrageous use of taxes!

Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks

#233

Post by eikenberry »

Our_Benefactors wrote: post #192
malfist wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it? If the LLMs change broke something do you know enough to fix it?

The same question can be applied to work without AI, so this isn’t a meaningful criticism

In one case you are using tools you understand, in the other you aren't. Seem different to me.

Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks

#234

Post by linsomniac »

Insimwytim wrote: post #81
pjc50 wrote: post #21

Lots of people reporting their "I had to use up my tokens, so I burned them on worthless stuff" stories. Incredible thing to do in a climate emergency. Push harder guys, maybe we can hit 3C warming? This reminds me of the story of how the USSR nearly made whales extinct to meet a quota for whale meat that nobody wanted to eat.

> USSR nearly made whales extinct USSR barely accounted for 15% of the world caught amount (with Japan as the leader). > that nobody wanted to eat unsubstantiated.

> unsubstantiated

Agreed for USSR, but I think the person you replied to is misremembering the country, I believe they are thinking of Japan. I heard it recently on Stuff You Should Know, which usually does a good job of researching their stories, and it sounds like it is substantiated but may be a bit more complex than presented, but literally true.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/save-the-whales/id2789... https://theworld.org/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/japa... https://theworld.org/stories/2019/04/16/whaling-japan-2 https://japantoday.com/category/national/75-of-meat-from-jap... https://www.traffic.org/site/assets/files/3994/whale_meat_tr...

Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks

#235

Post by mynameisash »

malfist wrote: post #166
ryandrake wrote: post #17

Not just Amazon, too. It feels like all of big tech (and some smaller firms) have simultaneously gone insane. Imagine if your CEO woke up one day and told the company: "We need to encourage travel spending. Please book as many business trips as you can, and spend as much money as possible. Fly first class to our satellite offices! Take limos instead of Ubers! Eat at fine restaurants! Make sure you are constantly trav…

At my company we were told AI spend was part of perf review and that the "singularity" had happened. Now 20% of our infrastructure spend is tokens. The average number of pull requests per dev per week increased with all this spend. From 4.2 to 5.1. And that includes a huge chunk of PRs that are just agents changing a line or two in a config. It's all magical thinking

> The average number of pull requests per dev per week increased with all this spend. From 4.2 to 5.1.

That's it? I've seen people that are consistently putting out four PRs per day. I don't/can't even code review them. So much of what we do is now just rubber-stamping PRs. We were even told that we shouldn't be writing code by hand anymore.

Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks

#236

Post by linsomniac »

Counterpoint: I've been "burning" a lot of tokens for the past year running experiments, not all of which have come to fruition. For example, I used around 15 hours of API-equivalent use building a DocuSign-like service which we arently likely to deploy to users. However, those experiments have definitely educated me on what and where and how to use the tooling.

Like I tell my kids: If every experiment you do succeeds, you aren't trying hard enough.

Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks

#237

Post by pjmlp »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #215
pjmlp wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No worries, we keep drinking from paper straws, because that is what really matters. The problem with not burning tokens is when you not meet the performance KPIs, get labelled as luddite and off you go, even before the job gets taken over by AI. I do agree with the sentiment, that and war mongers destroying the planet.

What's the logic of dissing paper straws in a comment raging against war and AI as threats to the environment? I see it a lot and assumed it was concern trolling from plastic manufacturers or libertarians funded by them but you seem genuine. Have you just fallen for that concern trolling? Grown so cynical that nothing matters anymore? I don't understand the intention if you have a genuine desire to improve society. W…

It is a distraction, the feel good for using paper straws instead of actions that actually make an impact, like improvements in the transport infrastructure, shutdown of factories that polluted the environment, flying people to meetings, limits of the kinds of engines that get produced, wars for profit, now AI data centers, and plenty of other examples that since covid the people big corps and governments could not care less.

Nah, one gets a cocktail with paper straw and feels like they are doing their part saving the planet.

Plastic straws aren't hard to find, by the way.

Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks

#238

Post by eikenberry »

thelopa wrote: post #205
laweijfmvo wrote: post #63

I work at a FAANG (not Amazon), and have heard this a lot, both internally and publicly. Except, never officially from anyone that mattered (leadership). It always starts with a rumor and/or someone (internal) creating a dashboard/metric, and blows up from there. I've even heard leaders proclaim that it's NOT what they're looking at, and that you better NOT be wasting those expensive tokens. Now, they might be; they'…

I recently left a FAANG. Shortly before I left (for unrelated reasons) the director of my org got scolded by the VP he reported to because token usage in his org was low. After that the ICs in my org were told to use ai for everything or there could be consequences for their careers.

> I recently left a FAANG.

Congratulations!

Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks

#239

Post by recursive »

dkarl wrote: post #121
ryandrake wrote: post #17

Not just Amazon, too. It feels like all of big tech (and some smaller firms) have simultaneously gone insane. Imagine if your CEO woke up one day and told the company: "We need to encourage travel spending. Please book as many business trips as you can, and spend as much money as possible. Fly first class to our satellite offices! Take limos instead of Ubers! Eat at fine restaurants! Make sure you are constantly trav…

I kind of get what they're thinking in trying to make sure all engineers use AI. For myself, and for the engineers working with me, I saw everyone go through an initial aversion and resistance to AI, and then an instant productivity boost when we started using them. So there's definitely a good reason to get everybody to start using AI. You don't want a good engineer resisting AI indefinitely if you know it will make…

I've been using it for many months. I still haven't gotten any kind of boost. If I'm going to get ranked on token use though, best believe I'll be using the optimal quantity of tokens.

Re: Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks

#240

Post by recursive »

dkarl wrote: post #227
swatcoder wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth reflecting on why it's so hard to convince hold outs to discover how AI might help them. The fundamental issue is that there really aren't many convincing demonstrations that hold outs can relate to and there remains basically no evidence of real value gained. Users attest to higher productivity and point to material but intermediate factors like token use, generated lines of code, pr counts, etc, but ther…

Unfortunately, a convincing demonstration to convince a skeptical colleague would require measuring developer productivity. Among skeptics, I've only seen people won over by using it themselves, because when they use AI for their own work, they invest the time to review the code, understand it, and assess its quality by their own standards. That's how people learn to trust AI coding assistance.

Perhaps amusingly, I think I actually trusted it more before I started using it. Specifically because of my assessment of its quality, including things like factual correctness.
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