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!"<p>We are living in a totally bonkers time.
> It feels like all of big tech (and some smaller firms) have simultaneously gone insane.<p>Some companies might just have been scammed by the marketing that told them that AI would make all their employees 10,000x more productive and save them billions and when that didn't happen the assumption was that it's because employees weren't using the new all powerful AI as often as they should be.<p>Other companies, especially those working on their own AI products, might want employees to use AI as much as possible because they hope it will provide them with the training data they'll need to eventually replace most or all of those employees with the AI. Punishing workers who refuse to train their replacement might make sense to them today.
At my company we were told AI spend was part of perf review and that the "singularity" had happened. Now 20% of our infrastructure spend is tokens. The average number of pull requests per dev per week increased with all this spend. From 4.2 to 5.1. And that includes a huge chunk of PRs that are just agents changing a line or two in a config. It's all magical thinking
I know some that was told to try and use AI more on the job so they created some agent to just burn tokens and ended up using about 10x what the next highest employee used. Buddy expected to get shit but instead got an accolade and was asked to give a short talk to the other employees about how they could match their success.
In my first job ever, I used to get my work done on time and leave. There were a few people who’d stay in the office until late and show up on weekends. Same output, but they got the promotions and my bonus got prorated.<p>This is the same thing.
I believe it
i call BS on this story
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law</a>
If you've never seen this level of perverse incentive, you have been lucky. The creation of and subsequent exploitation of them aren't new. For pre computer examples: <a href="https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-cobra-effect-2/" rel="nofollow">https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-cobra-effect-2/</a>
I call unintended consequences on this KPI culture
I have seen similar at my company so it is highly plausible.
I don’t.<p>Things that rhyme with this have indeed been happening at the biggest names.
I call AI on this comment
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.<p>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).<p>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.
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.
Even as a very happy NVDA shareholder I agree with you. It's comical that managers are being so naïve as to think that you can crap out a dashboard of "tokens consumed per week" and get any useful signal at all from it, beyond learning who's <i>not</i> using AI.<p>Incompetent use of a coding agent, or just general shenanigans, can burn tokens all day but it's not going to get tickets done.<p>Just looking at the work output - how many story points, tickets, how many new bugs are opened, etc. has not become any less relevant a metric for productivity with AI. If you're a skilled and proper user of AI those numbers would be changing in the right direction, compared to before you had it.
All those numbers are equally gameable and terrible metrics for productivity. With any of those, as with AI spending, you've got to look at actual results qualitatively. There's no shortcut.
I <i>kind of</i> get what they're thinking in trying to make sure all engineers use AI. For myself, and for the engineers working with me, I saw everyone go through an initial aversion and resistance to AI, and then an instant productivity boost when we started using them. So there's definitely a good reason to get everybody to start using AI. You don't want a good engineer resisting AI indefinitely if you know it will make them more productive.<p>Incentivizing people who are already using AI to use as many tokens as possible does seem a little crazy, though.
[delayed]
There is a limit somewhere, but I keep finding more and more ways to use AI.<p>Not just coding, but things like "here is my teams mandate, go through all my company's slack channels, linear tasks, notion pages, and recent merges in got, summarize any work other teams are doing that intersect with my team's work."<p>That'll burn a lot of tokens.<p>Set that up to run once or twice a week and give a report.
Exactly this.<p>And the fact that it is an industry-wide meme at this point makes bright red flashing lights and klaxons go off on my mind that a catastrophic reckoning can't be too far. There's not enough money in the world to keep this up for too long.
because it's come to CFO's as "free debt" aka fiat printing. They need to spend thisfree fiat to keep buble going. I'm sure some inv. banking team internally assured too. $Trillion instuitions have access to free printer now, you and I don't. This is different world since unlimited printer started in 2020. All debt math is fake now because they can create fiat money out of nothing,
literally.
It's more like "We really value face-to-face interaction, so we're going to track that with your total travel spend. We don't want to get in the way, so there's no budget."
This would be hilarious if a bunch of companies did not already do exactly this with exec travel. And academics do this all the time when travel has to be funded from grants.<p>One reason it works out like that for travel funding is that it’s often the ‘use it or lose it’ kind of funding. If you do not use all of the funds allotted, you can’t ask for more and could realistically get less.
Bragging about token usage is like bragging about LoC written.
When I was at Amazon last year, the bragging (from the AI poo-bah in my section of Amazon, note) about AI included "look at the total line count of commits from the heaviest AI users!"<p>So if AI screws something up and re-writes it and then screws it up again, needing another re-write, that counted as more positive than if it was done correctly, and simply, the first time.
It’s honestly 10x worse than LOC. At least in the human era LOC had correlation to shipping features.<p>It’s more like bragging about compiler cycles spent.
I don't know where you're working but LLM enhanced development has skyrocketed our rate of feature development. As an example, a project roadmapped to take 7 months was delivered in only 4.5 because of CC/Codex.<p>I'm confused how anyone could believe it isn't an enhancer, unless they have refused to use any of the technologies.
Obligatory:<p>Negative 2000 Lines of Code<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44381252">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44381252</a>
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.
> 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.<p>I had a manager like this once. He didn't last very long, but it was without a doubt the most fun six months of my career.
I wonder where in business school they teach you to "measure inputs and try to maximize them", because that's basically what's happening.
You mean like using lines of code as a metric to rank engineers [1]?<p>Managers love metrics. Bad managers particularly love metrics. Tokens used was almost the obvious bad metric that was going to be used.<p>I would argue that tokens used has actually exposed a useful metric: any manager who focused on this, demanded this or ranked based on this should be fired, for being a bad manager.<p>[1]: <a href="https://evan-soohoo.medium.com/did-elon-musk-really-fire-people-using-lines-of-code-as-his-metric-15c17254ed33" rel="nofollow">https://evan-soohoo.medium.com/did-elon-musk-really-fire-peo...</a>
It’s preposterous, companies are blindly funding slop and the product is fool’s gold.
IMO, the investors behind AI play the Uber game: they subsidise the AI costs and inject it into all facets of society they can get their hands on. They can tell the execs to increase AI usage at any cost. Their bet is that we'll become AI addicts with athrophied brains before they run out of money.<p>Also, don't forget that their datacenters will burn our electricity and boil our rivers at rates much cheaper than what we are billed in our homes. So while you're happy generating mountains of AI slop, somewhere there is a datacenter boiling a river.<p>I'd compare this to a new patented formula of water that's nobody asked for, and the patent owners are trying to replace all water supply with their crap before we wake up.
No need to invoke a hypothetical water example, just look to how Nestlé pushed baby formula in developing countries¹:<p>>For example, IBFAN claims that Nestlé distributes free formula samples to hospitals and maternity wards; after leaving the hospital, the formula is no longer free, but because the supplementation has interfered with lactation, the family must continue to buy the formula.<p>1: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Nestl%C3%A9_boycott" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Nestl%C3%A9_boycott</a>
But Brawndo's got what plants crave. It's got electrolytes.
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.<p>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.<p>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"<p>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."<p>So this story makes sense. They were being encouraged to just blast away at it six plus months ago.
I notice a lot of Cursor's suggestions are just stuff a linter should auto-fix.<p>But if you hit "tab" it'll claim that as an AI-edited line, LOL.<p>(A lot of the rest of it is stuff I could already have been doing just as fast if I'd ever bothered to learn to use multiple cursors, learned vim navigation, or set up some macros—I never did because my getting-code-on-the-screen speed without those has never been slow enough to hold anything up, in practice)
I still don't know how to reconcile these reports with what other people say about GenAI-agentic assisted engineering being the only way of working nowadays, especially in startups.<p>Probably there is no dichotomy going on and it depends on multiple factors, but it seems so weird to see reports that are so different between each other.
It's not required for startups. But if you are building trashy, brittle products and your main metric is speed to market, and have the expectation of high failure chances (e.g. most yc startup batches) - then yes you have to do agentic eng.<p>If you are making extremely specific, high quality products over a long time window and your founders are deeply experienced in that field of engineering, then no, you don't need agentic engineering and probably want very little llm code in general (outside of some boilerplate, internal toolings, etc).
Wage workers are evaluated on behaviors, founders are evaluated on growth and revenue. Of course usage patterns and outcomes will be different
I think you'll find that a lot of big investment companies are buried to the hilt in a lot of tech companies and also OpenAI and Anthropic. So you can do the math on where the directive is coming from and why it's not particularly careful or measured.
> You've used AI to do something that was a single command<p>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!
Not even joking that the main benefit I've seen from "AI" for editing code is that it lets me quickly do all the things I could already have been doing just as quickly if I'd ever bothered to learn to use my tools.<p>Of course I lose about as much time as I save to its fuck-ups, so I'd still have been better off learning to actually use a text editor properly. Though (as I mentioned in a another post) part of why I've never done that in 25ish years of writing code for pay is that my code-writing speed has never been too slow for any of the businesses I've worked in, i.e. other things move slowly enough it never mattered.
Once I learn a command that is both repeatable and useful, I prefer to either keep it in my mind or in my aliases. Thank you.
Is it? If the LLMs change broke something do you know enough to fix it?
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
> You dont need to know that command anymore<p>I find it hard to read "You can do things without knowing things" as a positive improvement in work, society, life, anywhere
It's also several hundred times more expensive.
I can't tell if this comment is sarcasm or not. If you let AI run commands you don't understand (especially in production) you may end up with some nasty surprises.
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.<p>Now, they might be; they've certainly used silly metrics in the past (LoC, commit count, etc.) without ever fully acknowledging it. But I don't believe that it's as simple as more tokens = more better.
Fellow FAANG. We have weekly manager meetings where leadership encourages us to increase token usage. We do push back, and leadership acknowledges that token spend is not a great metric and people are likely to game it... and then go right back to encouraging us to increase token spend in our teams.<p>We have token tracking dashboards that leadership is looking at. I know because they show us in these manager meetings. Haven't opened them to everyone yet as some kind of leaderboard, so at least that's nice.<p>Lots of rumors token spend will be involved in perf reviews. Leadership denies it... but then holds more meetings telling us how important it is to increase our token spend and discussing inadequacies from the token spend dashboards.
I'm in a large-ish peer group for engineering managers. AI token over-use is a growing problem.<p>The problem explodes at any company that puts up a token use leaderboard or hints that they might do layoffs for engineers that refuse to use AI tools. This triggers a race to use as many tokens as possible to stay ahead.<p>Anecdotally, the problem is worst among devs who read a lot of social media. Twitter, Threads, Mastodon, LinkedIn, and others are filled with recycled viral stories about companies going AI-native and firing people who don't use enough AI. Anxieties are high right now so nervous developers see this and think they must burn tokens faster than their peers to avoid an inevitable culling.
Enterprise consulting here, it is getting ridiculous, with forced trainings, workshops and hacktons to motivate use of AI in daily activities.<p>Stuff that could be easily done as shell scripts gets asked how could we make an agent out of it.
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.
I feel like it depends on the leader. I've definitely seen leaders value LoC beyond reason and cause worse, bloated codebases by rewarding cowboys with 10k line PRs.<p>Big companies have thousands of leaders. Many good, many bad.
My friend at Google says they have a "ai-usage" dashboard that tracks everyone's ai token usage as well as aggregated per team, per org, etc. There's a sign on it that says "don't use this for perf reviews!" but I think everyone knows that that's exactly what they're going to use it for.
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?<p>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.
I've been noticing how our economy keeps getting more <i>Soviet</i> as it becomes more top-down. We basically have central planning now with all the pathologies inherent in that system, but unlike the soviets we just have a bunch of guys who happened to get rich or bribe the right people running our GOSPLAN.
Things definitely feel 'Soviet' at my company. AI usage has been mandated by upper management (despite the fact that it doesn't really make sense or solve any problems in my particular job). They literally call it an "AI revolution." If you dare question the wisdom of the company's 'AI-First' policy, it's like you risk being singled out as a "counter-revolutionary."
Yeah, the stories I've heard from Meta are very Soviet-coded. Like, trying to exceed the plan but not too much, because then the new plan would be hopelessly unachievable and you'd be punished for not meeting the insane expectations.
The problem is that the founding fathers believed in constraining the state because it could be abusive, but they should have understood that all power ought to be subject to the people, not just state power.
No worries, we keep drinking from paper straws, because that is what really matters.<p>The problem with not burning tokens is when you not meet the performance KPIs, get labelled as luddite and off you go, even before the job gets taken over by AI.<p>I do agree with the sentiment, that and war mongers destroying the planet.
This is why we're clear-cutting forests to build new data centers? Not even for "real" productivity gains, but just for the sake of using the tokens.
Bullshit work has hit escape velocity, won’t be long now before we have huge warehouses filled with people doing sudoku for their daily food allowance, and that’s just how our entire economy functions.<p>How are we sliding face first into “snowpiercer but dumber”?
Gotta scale and then IPO those startups, so the VCs can cash out profitably.
> USSR nearly made whales extinct<p>USSR barely accounted for 15% of the world caught amount (with Japan as the leader).<p>> that nobody wanted to eat<p>unsubstantiated.
Yeah but what can we do. I don't want to be punished by work either.<p>Luckily I work in app management and I know they can only see the last date used so if I just put in one query per day I'm good.<p>But I'm so sick and tired of this AI hype :(
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.<p>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.<p>My company is doing the same thing.
That is exactly the point. It may be wasteful, but it's the fastest way to explore how AI may actually be useful to your business. Even if 80% of employees are just wasting tokens, you still have 20% who are figuring it out.
It is difficult to believe that you can cobra effect yourself into greatness. I'd rather say the most useful perk for companies doing this is the AI-washing adoption metrics they can report, which will hopefully (for them) increase valuations.
Even if that were true it'd mean that current AI usage is overshooting actual, productive use by 5x. This is a problem when all the AI projections are that the current state is the minimum and future usage will be 10+x.
I'm sorry, but that's insane. I mean, I guess if you have cash to burn I could think of even worse ways to spend it, but seriously, this is dumb. What other tool have businesses spent millions of dollars and person hours on to try and find something useful the tool can do?? Talk about a solution looking for a problem! If it's not clear in the early stages that this tool solves a problem then ditch it and move on! Give that extra cash to your employees and shareholders instead!
It's a shame AI now has a universal basic jobs[1] program, but humans still not. Companies are paying AI to dig holes, so other AI can fill them.<p>[1] <a href="https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-full-employment/" rel="nofollow">https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-full-employment/</a>
We didn't. The USSR had 100% employment long ago[0], and all the poverty that goes with it.<p>This isn't like that, as it isn't funded through taxes. This is private companies experimenting with their money, and risking downstream cost increases that may cause people to go elsewhere, as they do when they try anything new.<p>This is much better than just funding people regardless of productivity through forced taxes.<p>[0] <a href="https://nintil.com/the-soviet-union-achieving-full-employment" rel="nofollow">https://nintil.com/the-soviet-union-achieving-full-employmen...</a>
Right now there are state govts bending over backwards to provide cheap energy for data centers. The difference is being paid by people who live nearby through increased electricity costs. This is a tax with just extra steps
Are you sure this isn't being funded by our taxes? How many data centers are being built in areas where they have been given a huge tax break? How many banks are loaning money for AI infrastructure knowing that they'll be bailed out by taxpayers if they fail?
> as it isn't funded through taxes<p>This is simply not true, especially when you consider the massive amounts of government support so many parts of this "experiment with their own money" is getting. As a Utah resident its extremely evident in how forcefully they're pushing through what will be one of the largest datacenters in the world despite near universal disapproval from the citizens.
> We didn't. The USSR had 100% employment long ago[0], and all the poverty that goes with it.<p>I don't think USSR poverty rates surpassed those of Tsarist Russia that preceded them. To their credit, I think ideologic competition between capitalist and communist blocks was part of what allowed improvement of life conditions of workers in capitalist countries, after WWII. Fear of revolutions avoided one-percenters taking all productivity gains in the period. They had to share some to keep guillotines away. As soon as things went south in the USSR, from the 70s onwards, and capitalism took over the whole world, lacking any sort of viable extant competition, we reverted back to the old norm, the workers were denied their share of the productivity gains since then, and here are us now. A regime premised on free competition was undermined by lack of competition to itself.
[dead]
So we've seen sellers of AI hardware invest in AI software companies to create demand for their hardware. Now we are seeing AI (and/or AI adjacent) companies requiring their employees to use AI to create demand for AI. When does this snake finish eating its own tail?
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.<p>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'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 <i>nudge nudge, wink wink</i> after that statement.<p>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.
I'd do this if the other punch to follow wasn't <i>'justify the expenditure'</i>.<p>Choosing to wait for the PIP instead, if <i>$EMPLOYER</i> goes this way. Tell me the work I'm not doing and how pieces of ~~flair~~, <i>sorry, tokens</i> might help. Or don't, I don't care.
Anecdotal, but appears to be common among other comments in the thread.<p>For companies doing this there is no 'justify the expenditure'. Employees are being praised for high expenditure, regardless of actual outcome.<p>Leadership see the problem as 'people resisting AI'. Embracing AI is seen as the solution, and token usage is seen as the measure of success.
Goodharts Law - When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.<p><a href="https://lawsofsoftwareengineering.com/laws/goodharts-law/" rel="nofollow">https://lawsofsoftwareengineering.com/laws/goodharts-law/</a>
Made this as a joke but maybe it'll get some use<p><a href="https://token-burner.pages.dev/" rel="nofollow">https://token-burner.pages.dev/</a>
I work at AWS (disclaimer opinions are my own, do not reflect views of my employer) and i think the existence of a leaderboard has led to folks gamifying it. People see peers in a higher tier on the leaderboard and start burning tokens to catch up.<p>I think the company realizes this and is actively trying to avoid this, since for the new tools there isn't a leaderboard.
When your incentive is to tokenmaxx don’t be suprised when people game the system. Measurements something somethjng benchmark something something bad.
Dumb bureaucracy with dumb requirements will be met with corresponding response.
When are they going to admit that they over invested in AI and somehow have to justify that spend with usage down our throat?
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.
I dont know... this works out until someone approaches you and says: well we see you are using LOTS of tokens so you must be incredibly productive. Please show your results.
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.
There's really no end to dot-language diagrams you can have it make. Call graphs, package dependency maps, let it try to figure out an architecture diagram, whatever.
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.
There's two major types of documentation "why is this like this" documentation and then there's "here's the features of this library/tool" documentation. LLM stuff is fine for the latter as long as you screen it for hallucinations. Your right the former they can't really do because they don't have access to the reasoning but I've often found even the latter to be lacking in many teams.
If you have artifacts saved as you develop it can use those when writing docs to capture intent and design decisions.
Inaccurate documentation can be worse than no documentation at all!
...Yes. I didn't say fire and forget but it can handle a lot of rote recitation of library flags and functions perfectly well. The kind of stuff that's autogenerated with javadocs, inputs, outputs and effects that are all in the code are available to the LLMs. Like all things with LLMs generate and review but I've seen some good outputs with minimal errors that saved days of work no one was going to be given the time to do.
The Casual form of Goodhart's Law...
<a href="https://unintendedconsequenc.es/new-morality-of-attainment-goodharts-law/" rel="nofollow">https://unintendedconsequenc.es/new-morality-of-attainment-g...</a>
This is what happens when you can code faster than you can think. It’s kind of similar to a Facebook hiring 100s of engineers before it even knows what to do with them.
Vicious cycle right here. Making up tasks to burn tokens -> Hey people love to use AI -> More data centers built -> You now have to make up more tasks to burn more tokens.
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.
People need to start yelling, throwing things and publicly mocking execs that do this. What is wrong with you all? I do this (except the throwing) and I get nothing but respect. If you've been a good little soldier for years, done nothing but deliver and then you raise your ire people will listen.<p>If you can't change your company, change your company!
Similar situation here! In fact our team has a no-LLM policy that I'm quite happy with. We did experiment with it, to the point that one of our seniors atrophied so badly we had to let him go, and we're still paying down some of the slop residue...
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
Let it write unit tests for every single function in the codebase lol<p>I've chosen the wrong profession.
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.
This is foolish. High token use is associated with worse output. If you fill your models context you are going to be using a lot more context but the labs literally put out charts of how the models degrade at high context use.<p>This is analogous to measuring productivity by LoC output.
Good old Goodhart's law.
<a href="https://xkcd.com/2899/" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/2899/</a>
Token-driven development
Waiting for the YC startup in the next batch that provides tokenmaxxing-as-a-service.
Goodhart's Law in effect right there.
"When a metric becomes the target, it ceases to be a good measure".
Love it. This needs to become a new trend, and price per token can't rise soon enough.
Has anyone actually seen true business lift from agents or is this one of those "do stupid things faster" situation?
I think it's mixed. I have seen people with really good use cases and the opposite. It feels like the AWS/GCP situation all over again. Step 1: "this is amazing tech we need to leverage it immediately, use it as much as you can" Step 2: "oh shit this is getting expensive and I'm not sure of the ROI". We are approaching step 2
Use Vim or you're fired!
Long live Goodhart!
Corporate tech has accelerated into a preposterous trajectory.<p>Burn resources at all costs to appear productive and use proxy metrics to measure success.<p>Fire productive employees to ensure we have resources to fund the proxy metrics.<p>AI slop fool’s gold is the product.
yesterday's front page: AI is making me dumb. today's front page: employees are making AI dumb. the circle is complete.
Narrator: “it wasn’t just Amazon”
What's the root cause of these ridiculous decisions being taken at tech corporations? Constantly, they fall into fads like these that everyone with a brain knows make no sense but still many companies decide to follow them. For example: RTO -> what's the point of this shit? we never knew for sure but higher ups at most tech companies suddenly decided that RTO was the way to go forward despite all the downsides. Another example: DEI policies, some of them were very non-sensical.<p>I believe there has to be some downward pressure on these executives to take these decisions but I would like to know where it's coming from exactly and what's the logic behind them. Is it some big institution like Blackrock which has leverage on many of these companies? That's always been my bet but I never knew for sure.
Crappy managers don’t know (or actively avoid) how to measure business value from individuals. So they need you to be in the office so they can physically see if you are putting in the effort.<p>Tokens is just yet another proxy for business value.<p>The problem they face is if everybody is judge by business value in dollars, crappy managers are the first to go
I don’t even understand the point of making up tasks. Surely there’s some moonshot frustration project in your workday you could have an agent plugging away at, even if it’s unsuccessful.
When a measure becomes a target....
Especially a measure that's so easily manipulated.
I was just going to invoke Goodhart's Law<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law</a>
There are some secret random seeds that will prevent the end token and just keep generating forever. This will ruin your hardware though.
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.
This seems like AI is the new ponzi scheme.
[dead]
If GDP is going up, we must be wealthier and more productive, right? Surely? (/s)
New proposed corporate slogan: "Tokens must roll for victory!"<p>The original (third reich): "Wheels must roll for victory!"<p>It will end in the same manner.