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

#61

Post by bordumby » Tue, May 12, 2026, 5:14 PM UTC

wordpad wrote: post #48

_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.

Depends on what they're trying to incentivise. It's quite possible they aren't trying to measure performance but are literally just trying to increase token consumption to feed the bubble and hype. Plus pressure employees may find new unique use cases for AI. It's like if your goal is inflation, you give out tons of money and as long as its spent, you achieve your goal.

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

#62

Post by jrflo » Tue, May 12, 2026, 5:14 PM UTC

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #25

christkv wrote: post #20

Seems to be a clear case of Goodhart's Law that states that "when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

That's true, but I don't know if this one was ever a good measure in the first place. People use AI differently and they can be equally productive with a variety of token usage quantities. Also, different kinds of work are differently amenable to using AI.

I think we've found an extension of Goodhart's law- it makes bad measures even worse.

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

#63

Post by jkingsbery » Tue, May 12, 2026, 5:15 PM UTC

I work at Amazon (standard disclaimer: just sharing my own experience, not an official spokesperson, etc.)

I can't say that this isn't happening, but at least the parts of the company I get visibility into, what the article describes isn't my experience. There is a lot of interest in using GenAI, but people are mostly getting kudos around creative uses for GenAI, not just for raw amount of tokens. For most scaled GenAI efforts, there is a lot of focus on output metrics (metrics like accuracy, number of findings, number of things fixed, and so on).

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

#64

Post by boron1006 » Tue, May 12, 2026, 5:15 PM UTC

At least for some people I know it’s not necessarily because there’s pressure from leadership, but because it’s funny that the org spends like $15,000/mo writing HP fanfic or whatever

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

#65

Post by csoups14 » Tue, May 12, 2026, 5:15 PM UTC

Argonaut998 wrote: post #29

I swear the industry is being Garry Tanned. Senior management let go our localisation staff. Now they want us to use AI to translate. They still want manual review. We use Github Copilot at work, we get a measly 300 requests with the budget to go over if necessary. Opus 4.7 or GPT 5.5 would eat all of those up in a day. Are we supposed to be using more than the allotted amount, do management see that as a good thing.…

We've raised, trained, hired and promoted generations of business people who push utter nonsense, understand nothing but optimizing for bad metrics, and orient solely around short term results. It's hard to look beyond modern corporate America when looking for causes of the fall in our living standards. This AI tokenmaxxing nonsense is just another rung on the same ladder to hell we've been on for decades.

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

#66

Post by consp » Tue, May 12, 2026, 5:15 PM 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.

Goodhart's law in action.

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

#67

Post by pjmlp » Tue, May 12, 2026, 5:15 PM UTC

H8crilA wrote: post #55

pjmlp wrote: post #24

I can tell they are surely not the only ones. Everyone I talk to has nowadays KPIs tied to AI usage on their performance evaluation.

The most important skill is to not stand out of the crowd. This is how you survive in the Soviet Union, in the army, and clearly also at tech companies.

Quite a good point.

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

#68

Post by tyleo » Tue, May 12, 2026, 5:16 PM UTC

jaggederest wrote: post #26

tyleo wrote: post #6

I was thinking about this recently. I tend to run my AI at low context because the documentation states that they degrade with higher context usage. However I see tons of people on LinkedIn with ways of backing up context, not wanting to lose context, etc. This seems like another way the system is being misused. Higher context usage also uses more tokens. I suspect you get worse (and slower) output too than a dense d…

I think there are two motivations that get blurred pretty quickly: a) you find a particular context that executes well and want to preserve parts of it or not have to repeat explanations b) you want to continue a session so you don't have to rebuild the context from scratch I think A is something where it's totally reasonable to preserve pieces as part of like a prompt library or equivalent, or directory-specific age…

Yeah, I also agree that A is good in many cases.

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

#69

Post by legohead » Tue, May 12, 2026, 5:16 PM UTC

asdfman123 wrote: post #41

asdev wrote: post #35

People who don't code(management, leadership) think AI will 10x the company but it's really a 40-60% boost. But engineers have to feign adopting this tools in fear of layoffs

40% boost for smart engineers, for now. People churning out slop is slowing me down and the full effects of it won't be felt for a while.

the new bottleneck for development at work is code reviews. devs are creating whole features that would take months in only a couple weeks, but code reviewing that is a slow, painful process

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

#70

Post by rglover » Tue, May 12, 2026, 5:16 PM UTC

It is damn fascinating to see just how many (big, serious) organizations are creating unnecessary internal strife over this.

One of my favorite heuristics/quotes applies here: "no matter how good the strategy, occasionally consider the result."

Want to know if AI is working for your org? Ask yourself/employees to "show me the result." That requires judgment and taste (is the result something of value, or just the appearance of work having been done), but it will also save you a ton of stress and disappointment later.