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

Post by andrekandre » Sat, May 16, 2026, 3:17 AM UTC

paulhebert wrote: post #226

krupan wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, but that's insane. I mean, I guess if you have cash to burn I could think of even worse ways to spend it, but seriously, this is dumb. What other tool have businesses spent millions of dollars and person hours on to try and find something useful the tool can do?? Talk about a solution looking for a problem! If it's not clear in the early stages that this tool solves a problem then ditch it and move on! Giv…

Every dollar your company gives to AI providers is a dollar they're not paying you.

Post by andrekandre » Sat, May 16, 2026, 3:20 AM UTC

rtkwe wrote: post #113

sheept wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don't want to read LLM-generated docs though. It'll lack the context to justify why things were designed the way they were, and there's always a risk of hallucination so you still have to verify the documentation's claims, since the person who published it likely did not scrutinize it.

There's two major types of documentation "why is this like this" documentation and then there's "here's the features of this library/tool" documentation. LLM stuff is fine for the latter as long as you screen it for hallucinations. Your right the former they can't really do because they don't have access to the reasoning but I've often found even the latter to be lacking in many teams.

  > LLM stuff is fine for the latter as long as you screen it for hallucinations

Post by danaw » Sat, May 16, 2026, 4:21 AM UTC

jordanb wrote: post #50

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.

I've been noticing how our economy keeps getting more Soviet as it becomes more top-down. We basically have central planning now with all the pathologies inherent in that system, but unlike the soviets we just have a bunch of guys who happened to get rich or bribe the right people running our GOSPLAN.

Post by danaw » Sat, May 16, 2026, 4:24 AM UTC

lmkg wrote: post #29

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.

This is why we're clear-cutting forests to build new data centers? Not even for "real" productivity gains, but just for the sake of using the tokens.

Post by parineum » Sat, May 16, 2026, 4:57 AM UTC

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.