Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage–so they're making up tasks

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 traveling. In fact, we are going to make Travel Spending part of your annual performance review: If you don't spend enough on business travel, you'll get a low rating!"

We are living in a totally bonkers time.

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 should be a red flag"

He demonstrated a number of Claude Code use cases he had to manage and tweak AWS infrastructure that made me, the old greybeard sysadmin older than the internet think "You've used AI to do something that was a single command."

So this story makes sense. They were being encouraged to just blast away at it six plus months ago.

Lots of people reporting their "I had to use up my tokens, so I burned them on worthless stuff" stories. Incredible thing to do in a climate emergency. Push harder guys, maybe we can hit 3C warming?

This reminds me of the story of how the USSR nearly made whales extinct to meet a quota for whale meat that nobody wanted to eat.

Within Amazon, token usage is gamified if you use Kiro and your team isn't billed for it in the same way you are billed for AWS or have to account for your capacity in older systems. I've credibly heard of people gaming this internal ranking before anyone paid attention to it. There are also tons of enthusiasts doing all kinds of internal projects and sharing them.

There's definitely some pressure from managers when they hear about N00% productivity boosts in internal presentations, but where I am at they would figure out if you were making up tasks rather than working pretty quickly and the pressure comes from aggressive deadlines and a shift from the yearly OP1 process to a more agile one.

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.

I've heard similar stories from AWS and other non-AWS FAANG employees. All of the token leaderboards have a "this doesn't count toward your performance review" disclaimer, but there's an implied nudge nudge, wink wink after that statement.

One person I've talked to has someone in their org who is running GasTown and chews through tokens 24/7. They don't contribute very much, but they're comfortably in the #1 spot.

Hasn't Anthropic being experiencing issues due to extremely high usage? Being their investor, you would think Amazon wouldn't do Anthropic dirty by weakening their ability to handle user traffic

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.

Let it write unit tests for every single function in the codebase lol

I've chosen the wrong profession.

I have colleagues at prime video who consult AI the way medieval clerks once consulted omens, generating entire chains of speculative labor after ritual examinations of any of their given codebases. no real or new initiatives / innovations are being pushed forward, and thats rumored to be happening in other departments as well.

Narrator: “it wasn’t just Amazon”

This is coming to my workplace too. They send us angry reminders if we don't use copilot in ms office every day :( I just type Hello to it.

Being an investor in Anthropic, Amazon must have a preferred billing rate, but others do not. No wonder their revenue shot up so much, so fast, because of BS goals like those.

Token-driven development

Good old Goodhart's law. https://xkcd.com/2899/

Goodhart's Law in effect right there.

There are some secret random seeds that will prevent the end token and just keep generating forever. This will ruin your hardware though.

When a measure becomes a target....

This is what I do. I tell AI to go through every file in my project, identify up to 10 bugs per file, and then write the markdown with the name of the file plus "bugfix". This takes about 2 hours. Then I delete all the files with the suffix "bugfix" and then do it again.

Corporate tech has accelerated into a preposterous trajectory.

Burn resources at all costs to appear productive and use proxy metrics to measure success.

Fire productive employees to ensure we have resources to fund the proxy metrics.

AI slop fool’s gold is the product.

New proposed corporate slogan: "Tokens must roll for victory!"

The original (third reich): "Wheels must roll for victory!"

It will end in the same manner.