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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

#401

Post by bigstrat2003 »

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…

People are not actually more productive with LLMs, they are less productive. The data has shown this. So there's no reason to push people into using them - it's all just hype and magical thinking.

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

#402

Post by bigstrat2003 »

dingaling wrote: post #245
ijidak wrote: post #209

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 I have. My conclusion is... humans are deeply irrational when it comes to rapid change. Egg or olive oil prices spike, humans out an entire government. The rate of immigration spikes, humans throw them into camps and break useful treaties. Most of the resistance I've observed amongst engineers is resistance to change…

> resistance to change generally Nah, software engineers were always butterflies fluttering from one language or framework to the Next Hot Thing. Change was part of the job, if you didn't keep up you fell behind and atrophied. Resistance to AI is, I think, more because it is seen as an existential threat, or because it's something whose ultimate long-term outcome is still undefined. It's going to be either a benefit…

Resistance to AI is because it doesn't work. It has nothing to do with job security. It's a tech with nothing but hype, no substance at all.

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

#403

Post by untrust »

monkaiju wrote: post #155
swader999 wrote: post #46

People need to start yelling, throwing things and publicly mocking execs that do this. What is wrong with you all? I do this (except the throwing) and I get nothing but respect. If you've been a good little soldier for years, done nothing but deliver and then you raise your ire people will listen. If you can't change your company, change your company!

Similar situation here! In fact our team has a no-LLM policy that I'm quite happy with. We did experiment with it, to the point that one of our seniors atrophied so badly we had to let him go, and we're still paying down some of the slop residue...

> to the point that one of our seniors atrophied so badly we had to let him go

What was the time scale here? Was it actual skill atrophy or were they just shipping slop PRs all the time

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

#406

Post by epgui »

Henchman21 wrote: post #171
MrCharismatist wrote: post #9

Like six months ago we got a presentation from an AWS guy on the AI tooling available and how it fit with our particular use cases. At one point seemingly out of nowhere he pointed out on his screen share "Look at how many tokens I've used this month. I run so much Opus." It was a number that was offensively large. I remember thinking "That's a really odd flex, this crap is so expensive the fact that you use so much…

> "You've used AI to do something that was a single command." As time passes and the layers of abstraction pile up, later generations won't understand the underlying layers of the abstraction. This is a huge weakness in our systems development -- and a huge potential attack surface for adversaries.

AI is not even an abstraction over a CLI command, in any sense.

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

#407

Post by nitwit005 »

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'…

We got an email stating our managers would be monitoring our usage. I got an angry slack scolding for zero AI use, which was simply that I'd been signed on with an alternate version of my email, and they hadn't accounted for that.

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

#408

Post by nitwit005 »

this_user wrote: post #38
onion2k wrote: post #6

I'd bet that the goal is for people to 'game' it though. By pushing people to use AI more they'll try it, experiment with it, 'waste' time on it ... and from that they'll learn about it. That's the end goal. They're using tokens for pointless stuff right now in order to figure out use cases where it helps. You can't do that without also learning where it doesn't help. My company is doing the same thing.

That is exactly the point. It may be wasteful, but it's the fastest way to explore how AI may actually be useful to your business. Even if 80% of employees are just wasting tokens, you still have 20% who are figuring it out.

That would be 20% who _might_ figure it out. That's essentially R&D spend, which has no guarantee of success.

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

#410

Post by AlexeyBelov »

0xy wrote: post #147
zeroonetwothree wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s honestly 10x worse than LOC. At least in the human era LOC had correlation to shipping features. It’s more like bragging about compiler cycles spent.

I don't know where you're working but LLM enhanced development has skyrocketed our rate of feature development. As an example, a project roadmapped to take 7 months was delivered in only 4.5 because of CC/Codex. I'm confused how anyone could believe it isn't an enhancer, unless they have refused to use any of the technologies.

I can confirm it's an enhancement in writing code specifically. We've been actively using CC in our company for more than 6 months already.

Notably, the product itself isn't really better for users. And almost everything else apart coding now takes the bigger percentage of time. So as devs we could either just fuck around and refactor endlessly, or chill out and "complete the sprint in 30% of time". It was known for a long time that churning out code is not the bottleneck.

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