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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

#91

Post by wahnfrieden »

wolvoleo wrote: post #73
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'…

In our place it is really a thing and comes from leadership. They feel like they spent a lot on copilot and they want to see people using it.

It's too bad that they go with a safe enterprise option that is so deficient that the outcomes will be bad and lots of people will learn useless lessons that don't translate to state of the art tools and usage patterns

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

#93

Post by overfeed »

rtkwe wrote: post #8
AMerrit wrote: post #2

I've done similar at my job where management wants us to use all of our tokens before they expire. I usually set it to documentation tasks and other minor tasks just to eat up tokens.

At least that nominally creates some value at the end of the day. Documentation is the thing everyone wants but no one has time/desire to create. My most recent token heavy task was having an agent write unit tests for coverage on a little graphAPI tool I'd written a bit ago to satisfy SonarQube.

Inaccurate documentation can be worse than no documentation at all!

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

#96

Post by shigawire »

sheept wrote: post #72
rtkwe wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least that nominally creates some value at the end of the day. Documentation is the thing everyone wants but no one has time/desire to create. My most recent token heavy task was having an agent write unit tests for coverage on a little graphAPI tool I'd written a bit ago to satisfy SonarQube.

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.

If you have artifacts saved as you develop it can use those when writing docs to capture intent and design decisions.

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

#97

Post by glenngillen »

bluGill wrote: post #52
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…

My dad worked at a company that had their own travel agency (early 90s when you needed a travel agent for reasons that no longer apply), and he was often booked on the more expensive flight because the travel agency made more money. More than once he could have got first class for less on a different flight but company policy didn't allow him to fly first class. We have always been living in bonkers time.

Most big companies still have travel agencies/companies manage their corporate travel. I can’t remember who we used when I was at Amazon, but I made a similar complaint to my manager once given I could fly cheaper in a higher class on a different airline (also one I had heaps of points with so I would have preferred it because I’d be able to upgrade further and/or use the lounge).

Turns out the price I saw in the booking portal isn’t actually what Amazon paid. It’s kinda more like a rack rate listing. But then there’s all kinds of discounting/cash back that happens on the backend based on the amount of travel booked each month.

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

#98

Post by MrCharismatist »

Our_Benefactors wrote: post #35
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 Yes, and that’s a good thing! This is in fact where a lot of AI value lies. You dont need to know that command anymore - knowing the functional contract is now sufficient to perform the requisite work duties. This is huge!

Look, I feel for junior admins, I was one 35 years ago and the only reason I'm where I am today was because I had to learn the hard way, repeatedly and often.

I use the shit out of opencode to do things as a force multiplier, not as a way to keep me from knowing what its doing.

The point at which we're optimizing for "we don't need to know that anymore" is the point at which everything blows up, because agentic work is not fully deterministic, models hallucinate even simple things.

Blindly relying on your agent weapon of choice to just do the right thing because you didn't take the time to understand how the lego fits together is an actual problem.

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

#99

Post by varispeed »

bluGill wrote: post #52
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…

My dad worked at a company that had their own travel agency (early 90s when you needed a travel agent for reasons that no longer apply), and he was often booked on the more expensive flight because the travel agency made more money. More than once he could have got first class for less on a different flight but company policy didn't allow him to fly first class. We have always been living in bonkers time.

I used to know someone whose parent worked at travel agency (also 90s) and their whole immediate family could book trips wherever, but only economy class.

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

#100

Post by treis »

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…

If we suddenly went from rail travel to jets that's exactly what would happen. We'd go from 0 to all the business flights that happen today. Everyone would be under enormous pressure to not be a laggard.
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