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

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271–280 of 450 posts

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

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's too bad that they go with a safe enterprise option that is so deficient that the outcomes will be bad and lots of people will learn useless lessons that don't translate to state of the art tools and usage patterns

Yes agreed. It's actually the office version of copilot which isn't much to write home about. Apparently the github one is more useful for its target audience.

GitHub's Copilot CLI is nice enough; now it is not as well-packaged as Claude Code, but I like being able to use their harness in my emulator of choice, and it gets better at the little stuff every week.

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

#272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what inspired me to build my new CLI tool, Burn, Baby, Burn ( https://github.com/dtnewman/burn-baby-burn/tree/main ). (If you are a VP at Amazon, yes, I'll consider acquisition offers. I'm also working on an enterprise version of this with additional features.) Show HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48151287

Just sent it to some developers who could really benefit from this! Please let us know when you have Codex and Gemini versions ready to rumble.

Sorry, it will be a while. We're currently building out enterprise features like SSO/SAML support, role based burn access, and a carbon offset marketplace. As you can imagine, we're burning a lot of tokens to get these out, but actual productivity isn't up as much as you'd think.

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

#273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the stories I've heard from Meta are very Soviet-coded. Like, trying to exceed the plan but not too much, because then the new plan would be hopelessly unachievable and you'd be punished for not meeting the insane expectations.

So like Publix company earnings? You have to beat by a little so you're not just flat but beat by too much and you look incompetent/suspicious

YES! I've been trying to explain this about Publix for a week now but I couldn't put it to words.

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

#274
Here I am wishing my employer would give me any AI modestly. I do more in my time off, with higher quality (in terms of how much I build, I don't like to just spit out features mindlessly and endlessly) due to the ability to plan things out more, and have a wealth of knowledge to help me poke holes and find things that make sense that I have not thought of, or even bypass limitations I thought would block me forever.

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

#275

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…

This is what inspired me to build my new CLI tool, Burn, Baby, Burn ( https://github.com/dtnewman/burn-baby-burn/tree/main ). (If you are a VP at Amazon, yes, I'll consider acquisition offers. I'm also working on an enterprise version of this with additional features.) Show HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48151287

Brilliant

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

#276

I work at AWS (disclaimer opinions are my own, do not reflect views of my employer) and i think the existence of a leaderboard has led to folks gamifying it. People see peers in a higher tier on the leaderboard and start burning tokens to catch up. I think the company realizes this and is actively trying to avoid this, since for the new tools there isn't a leaderboard.

Right, the leaderboard is internal.

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

#278
Slack recently introduced this option where it can tell you what kind of animal you are (not kidding) based on the conversations you had. When I saw this I immediately thought "managers pushed poor folks at Slack to incorporate more AI into the product".

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

#279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wonder if we will ever reach a point on society where tokens just become the universal currency. We will all work for tokens, pay our bills in tokens, make purchases in tokens, strippers will dance for tokens, etc.. I'm kidding, of course... but human stupidity is infinite, so...

Systems where the money is redeemable for something make a lot more sense than what we're doing with dollars. It's easy: you value the money if you value the thing it's redeemable for. When you exchange that kind of money with people, you know something about which values you share with them.

When it comes to dollars, it's hard to know what "value" even means.

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

#280
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I notice a lot of Cursor's suggestions are just stuff a linter should auto-fix. But if you hit "tab" it'll claim that as an AI-edited line, LOL. (A lot of the rest of it is stuff I could already have been doing just as fast if I'd ever bothered to learn to use multiple cursors, learned vim navigation, or set up some macros—I never did because my getting-code-on-the-screen speed without those has never been slow enoug…

Cursor absolutely tries to maximize what they claim is "AI-edited" and it's nonsense a lot of the time. If it writes a function and then I got in and edit that function, it claims my edits _and_ any net-new lines I add above or below the function.

So their diff mechanism is poorly labeled (or purposely?) then.
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