This makes me think of the tulip bubble. Using AI as much as possible just so people think you are productive is like buying tulips so that people think you're affluent.
Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools
91–100 of 268 posts
Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools
#92Amazon is big and inconsistent enough that "somewhere in Amazon, is occurring" is statistically true, no matter how nutso-sounding your .
Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools
#93I wish I could do some tokenmaxxing at my company. The only plan available is maxed out for the month after a few days of serious work, but the AI “experts” are declaring that nobody needs that much. It’s really frustrating to constantly have to juggle quota and lower models. All this while the declared goal is to reach 50% of code written by AI.
Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools
#94I 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 Gen…
> There is a lot of interest in using GenAI, but people are mostly getting kudos around creative uses for GenAI,
LOL, I'd imagine even Amazon HR would be little restraint in showering such praise.
Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools
#95People 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
> 40-60% boost Where? What industry, what kind of projects? The only one where I can imagine it to be true is vulnerability research, and I imagine all the low-hanging fruit to be picked soon
Any typical web backend or frontend kind of thing. So like, not systems code.
Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
The bottleneck at my work for development was already code review before LLMs.
Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools
#97People 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
> 40-60% boost Where? What industry, what kind of projects? The only one where I can imagine it to be true is vulnerability research, and I imagine all the low-hanging fruit to be picked soon
Mine, easily. Senior (near staff) level embedded engineering.
It will spin up a boilerplate uboot or BSP config no problem. I still go in and manually check and add peripherals, but opus 4.7 is terrifyingly smart.
Need to modify or add a new peripheral, it's there no problem. Or in a bare metal project, I can point it at an STM32 cubemx starter repo and ask for a feature (set up the ADC on pins 4 and 7, ask me for parameters) and it's just done. I do in a day what would probably take me 2.
It doesn't help me with reviewing others' work, or planning (I maintain that these are manual tasks). So yeah, I agree with the 40-60%. The parts of my job it helps, it really helps.
Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools
#98I 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 Gen…
Thanks for the inside insight.
I'm surprised how few comments are written with the prior that Amazon managers aren't stupid or uninformed about how incentives work.
My guess would be that someone created the leaderboard without a lot of consultation with managers, and that some employees feel a competitive urge to try to "win" the leaderboard by burning tokens.
Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools
#99People 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.
Yesterday, I had my first experience of a mid-level dev stuck on a problem, coming to me with Codex and Copilot summaries of what those tools thought the problem was, which turned out to be completely off-base.
Codex was pretty sure something was wrong with the response object being returned by the endpoint in question. It turned out there was a conversion method applied to the endpoint response, which mutated its input. This method had been running w/o problems for a while, until the dev put it in a useEffect. At this point, React dev mode's policy of rendering everything twice kicked in, which caused the second pass through the conversion method to fail on the now-mutated input object.
Codex never even hinted that the conversion method mutating the input could be a problem, nor anything about React dev mode rendering everything twice (specifically to catch problems like this). Apparently, neither of those came up much in its training data.
My point is that this dev seems to have lost, in a few short months of writing everything with Codex, the ability to trace an error from its source (the error trace was being swallowed in a Codex-written catch block that spit out a generic error message). He was completely stuck and just kept doubling down on trying to get Codex to solve the problem, even checking with Copilot as a backup. I'm not optimistic about where this is headed.
Re: Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools
#100Saw a good joke on twitter about it. Something like: "You spent $23, over the $20 food limit. Be more careful next time. You spent $600 on tokens, $200 more than the average. Congratulations!"
https://x.com/vasuman/status/2053956365052240263
> whoever spent $600 on Anthropic last night, great job leveraging Al! But to the person who spent $23 on Uber Eats please remember our limit for food is $20 per meal