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Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools
81–90 of 268 posts
Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools
#82Once you have a score, you have a game. Once you have a game, people will do whatever it takes to win.
I don't think you need to win this, you just need to not be near the bottom of the board. But just in case, I spam tokens like it's the Chuck E Cheese roulette game.
Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools
#83I 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.…
Requests are such a weird metric. We have a token limit via Copilot (unless I'm misunderstanding our setup), and most of my "features" burn 1 to 2% of my token limit per month on 4.7. But I don't admin our plan, and I'm unsure what we actually git. Vscode just gives me a percentage of tokens remaining metric.
One of the weirder things about all this is how arbitrary and non objective the billing structure seems. One of the reasons I'm happy to use it at work, but won't ever personally subscribe. It's so opaque.
Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools
#84I 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.…
How you burn 300 requests in a day? From my Copilot usage Opus consumes surprisingly few requests to do a lot of stuff. It isn’t paying by token but instead by prompt or something.
Opus 4.7 has a 7.5x multiplier when it's used from Copilot. Falling back to 4.6 it's only 3.5x
Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools
#85I have mixed thoughts on this. These thoughts are my own. On the one hand, it’s objectively silly to pretend like we’ve solved the age old problem of measuring developer productivity. Metric-obsessed leadership can also be intolerable, counterproductive, and it’s a good way to paint yourself into a corner undervaluing your best talent and overvaluing your mediocre talent. That said, I’m kind of having a blast using C…
Could you list us some of the capabilities you use that bring value besides “summarize my email”
Yes, we can crawl our entire internal documentation via LLM. Want to know if someone is already working in the space of your latest idea? Ask Claude, it hits the internal search APIs and finds docs and references directly relevant to your query. There are a lot of separate document stores so this took a lot of effort previously. I can also query Slack, Outlook, etc. I don’t understand the cynicism in your comment.
Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools
#86[flagged]
Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools
#87“Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.” ― Charlie Munger
When I was at Amazon, I suggested that promotion to L7 people manager should require that reverse tattooed on your forehead so that you saw it every day. Every time some mandate would come down from on high, it was clear that nobody had thought of the second order effects, malicious compliance, or just outright gaming.
Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools
#88I, too, can easily use more tokens to achieve the same task. I can give worse prompts. I can fail to make it clear to the tools where to find the information they need. I can ask them to think hard when the don’t need to ask tell them not to think when they do need to. I can give vague, open ended instructions. I can generate code that sucks and throw it away. If I do all of this, do I get a promotion?
Even if I'm in the middle of using the AI seriously but then want to rename a variable, I can't do that myself because it'll confuse the AI, so I'll tell it to rename. That seems pretty wasteful.
Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools
#89This reads more like it's a single employees gripe than a real thing that's happening. They're not using the metrics in performance reviews, and it's a new AI tool that AWS probably wants legitimate usage data out of. That said, if you can't figure out how to use AI in a software job you should look into it. Not using AI at this point is a lot like not using CAD as an architect.
It is being used in performance reviews, source: recent Amazon SWE. They also use a bunch of dumb metrics like, total PRs submitted, total comments made on PRs, etc. To the point that, there are multiple heavily used internal tools to game these metrics. Eg, auto-comment LGTM on any approved PR. Thus, making the metrics even worse than they would have been prior.
> Amazon has told employees that the AI token statistics would not be used in performance evaluations.
> Managers are discouraged from using token use to measure performance, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Like CAD and architects, if you're not using LLM's while coding it's an issue, but Amazon is very clear that this isn't an official metric. I would believe managers know how many tokens you're using, but it sounds like they just interviewed a disgruntled employee who didn't like AI and published it.
Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools
#90When did FT become Business Insider? I have an FT subscription and they keep moving toward this kind of narrative first reporting to get clicks. It’s no longer a believable paper.
Business Insider would say "tokenmaxxing is pure promotional intelligence"