by ryandrake
37 subcomments
- 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.
by MrCharismatist
5 subcomments
- 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.
by laweijfmvo
8 subcomments
- 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'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.
- 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.
- 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.
[1] https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-full-employment/
- 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'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.
- 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.
- Devil's advocate - this is a forcing function to get people to try out AI whom might be reluctant to try it. I'm speaking from personal experience, I was 'forced' to use the tools as it is being tracked, and found genuine use-cases.
Of course at some point the 'benefit' is outweighted by the 'negatives', e.g people making up work. Tokens used is about as useful a measure of productivity as 'hours in office'.
EDIT: My use-case still have relatively low token usage though lol
- Goodharts Law - When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
https://lawsofsoftwareengineering.com/laws/goodharts-law/
- 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.
- This article inspired me to build "Burn, baby burn", a CLI tool for burning tokens. See:
- Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48151287
- github: https://github.com/dtnewman/burn-baby-burn
- Maybe they could devote some resources to updating Amazon's customer facing AI instead. I ordered some programming books last night, and was told they'd arrive tomorrow (I'm a prime member and live near a major hub so this is the norm). This morning I found the date had been pushed back to May 27, a very surprising outcome (these were popular books from O'Reilly and similarly high volume publishers, not some obscure imprint).
I asked Alexa (on the amazon web page) about it and it couldn't tell me which carrier had the items or why they were delayed, directed me to a non-existent phone number and then denied it had done so. The customer service bot I was eventually redirected to was even worse, and started telling my that items would be delivered both tomorrow and by May 27 in the same message. Finally I got human intervention, who said the items would arrive tomorrow and that the delivery status had been updated, but the order page still says they're arriving at the end of next week.
- Slack recently introduced this option where it can tell you what kind of animal you are (not kidding) based on the conversations you had. When I saw this I immediately thought "managers pushed poor folks at Slack to incorporate more AI into the product".
by bravetraveler
1 subcomments
- I'd do this if the other punch to follow didn't appear to be 'justify the expenditure'.
Choosing to wait for the PIP instead, if $EMPLOYER goes this way. Tell me the work I'm not doing and how pieces of ~~flair~~, sorry, tokens might help. Or don't, I don't care.
by whoneedstokens
0 subcomment
- Made this as a joke but maybe it'll get some use
https://token-burner.pages.dev/
- When are they going to admit that they over invested in AI and somehow have to justify that spend with usage down our throat?
- 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.
- People want to get promoted or put things on their resume about AI, the only way is to force others to use/work with AI to bump up their numbers on the resume or to say they pushed some new AI initiative. Because all the new jobs or promotions require the new hot thing - AI.
- When a founder from a non-tech company told me that he personally spent over 2000 dollar in last month in coding (He never coded before) with proud, I'm asking him why using API instead of subscription, he told that, "the model is different, I spend more, it's a better and smarter model without limitation".
I thought they just want to show up to others(especially non tech guys) that they spent high, so they know more about AI
by shibaprasadb
0 subcomment
- I had written about the same: https://www.shibaprasadb.com/2026/04/29/tokenmaxxing-tap-in....
This is the new tap-in tap-out!
by rambojohnson
0 subcomment
- 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.
- It’s not surprising given Amazon’s pretty lackluster position in AI beyond providing raw compute, which itself is basically a commodity at this point.
Have heard very similar stories to what the article describes. There were also outright revolts from tech folks being forced to use Amazon’s own shit self-built AI vs Claude Code and other top-tier products.
Given Amazon’s early start with Echo and Alexa they should have absolutely dominated this AI revolution but have been scrambling in a panic ever since ChatGPT showed up on scene and always seem two steps behind the market.
It all paints a picture inside Amazon of clueless leaders at the top and mobs of others below them just gaming the system so a silly dashboard looks green. “Day 2” has arrived.
- 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?
by paulorlando
0 subcomment
- The Casual form of Goodhart's Law...
https://unintendedconsequenc.es/new-morality-of-attainment-g...
- “Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.” ― Charlie Munger
- Let it write unit tests for every single function in the codebase lol
I've chosen the wrong profession.
> But a representative for Amazon said that there is no such company-wide metric for AI usage, nor are there internal leaderboards where employees are measured against each other. Rather, employees are able to view their own AI usage on personal dashboards.
Such a bullshit statement. There is a _global_ dashboard that ranks Kiro/QuickSuite (formerly Amazon Q) usage per-employee based on tokens. The dashboard itself is in QuickSight (well, that also became part of QuickSuite anyway).Not only the data is open to anyone, you can clearly sort by rank, daily/weekly/monthly/yearly usages. Current and former employees included. (By internal alias).
Moreover, there is an internal "awards" system that shows up in PhoneTool profile, each employee gets "awarded" of Kiro/AmazonQ/Quicksuite titles like "Blaze", "Thunderstorm", etc. You can see other recipients of the same award just by clicking on it.
Note: PhoneTool is an internal profile directory where you can look up other employees as oneself...
---On the side, I know several people who cannot produce proper code themselves, or integrate to anything on their own. Those who need constant hand-holding keep producing immense amount of stuff with Kiro/AmazonQ, over-ranking SDEs nowadays. (these are not SDEs, more of SysDev, Support Engineers and TPMs). This itself is not a specifically good or a bad thing. But once they stack-rank based on the token usage, I am pretty sure "good" engineers who put effort into writing "good" code will rank worse than people who does not put effort into "concise" solutions. Therefore, quality will eventually detoriate. And it will be too late once the leadership realizes what has been going on. (Well, they already seen the Amazon-Q/Kiro related outages and keep denying it...)
by netdevphoenix
1 subcomments
- 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
- It is the same in almost all tech companies now.
by giancarlostoro
1 subcomments
- Here I am wishing my employer would give me any AI modestly. I do more in my time off, with higher quality (in terms of how much I build, I don't like to just spit out features mindlessly and endlessly) due to the ability to plan things out more, and have a wealth of knowledge to help me poke holes and find things that make sense that I have not thought of, or even bypass limitations I thought would block me forever.
by delbronski
0 subcomment
- 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.
- 1. so is everyone who is subject to a corporate mandate... but...
2. this may be ok. A good way to learn a piece of software or tool or process is to play with it. We learn lots of general knowledge through play and experimentation. Heck we get better at musical instruments by playing on them.
Mandates are kind of dumb in many ways. But they will force the issue of discovering whether anything useful can come from AI other than coding.
- If the financial or career incentives for management relies on 'Token usage growth', then that is what will happen to the detriment of everything else.
by throwatdem12311
0 subcomment
- When your incentive is to tokenmaxx don’t be suprised when people game the system. Measurements something somethjng benchmark something something bad.
by swader999
1 subcomments
- 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.
If you can't change your company, change your company!
- > Unlike other AI models, OpenClaw and MeshClaw run locally on users’ own hardware, giving them unprecedented independence.
No, they don’t.
- 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.
I think the company realizes this and is actively trying to avoid this, since for the new tools there isn't a leaderboard.
by almost_usual
1 subcomments
- 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.
by xiaoyu2006
0 subcomment
- > Amazon employees are reportedly using the company’s new internal AI tool, MeshClaw, to create extraneous AI agents—not to increase productivity, but to drive up AI activity.
Every time I see "not... but..." I suspect an AI article. Not sure if this is the case here.
- Waiting for the YC startup in the next batch that provides tokenmaxxing-as-a-service.
- > But a representative for Amazon said that there is no such company-wide metric for AI usage, nor are there internal leaderboards where employees are measured against each other. Rather, employees are able to view their own AI usage on personal dashboards.
Such a bullshit. There is (was) Amazon Q (Now QuickSuite) leaderboard which is a Quick Sight dashboard. Moreover, each PhoneTool
- 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.
This is analogous to measuring productivity by LoC output.
by spprashant
0 subcomment
- Good old Goodhart's law.
https://xkcd.com/2899/
- Feature Request: borrow and burn your teams token so that the whole projects looks green so that you can earn your performance bonus.
by chris_engel
1 subcomments
- 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.
- Token-driven development
by linsomniac
0 subcomment
- Counterpoint: I've been "burning" a lot of tokens for the past year running experiments, not all of which have come to fruition. For example, I used around 15 hours of API-equivalent use building a DocuSign-like service which we arently likely to deploy to users. However, those experiments have definitely educated me on what and where and how to use the tooling.
Like I tell my kids: If every experiment you do succeeds, you aren't trying hard enough.
- amazon needs to get the api gateway payload size fixed if they really want people to expand their bedrock use.
that and make sure the tools are actually up treating amazon internal as real customers.
its hard to stay excited about the tools when they can be down for a week because kiro launched.
by brightball
0 subcomment
- Goodhart's Law in effect right there.
- Narrator: “it wasn’t just Amazon”
- Better metric than lines of code added
by graphememes
0 subcomment
- can't come home today babe im tokenmaxxing
by throwmeaway876
1 subcomments
- 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.
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.
- 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.
by general1465
0 subcomment
- 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.
- They invented a product that has no possible cost control: you don't know how much you've used until you've used it. And then we somehow made it a virtue to use as much as possible. I can't think of a more effective money printing factory.
I wonder when we'll see our first "My startup went bankrupt on AI use" post. Amazon is being dumb but at least they can afford it.
by 2OEH8eoCRo0
2 subcomments
- Use Vim or you're fired!
by kittikitti
0 subcomment
- 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....
by gofreddygo
0 subcomment
- Long live Goodhart!
by insane_dreamer
0 subcomment
- I use CC almost daily, and I have a Max subscription and have never hit a hard cap. I spend $100/month.
How are people burning through hundreds/thousands of $ of tokens a week/month?
What am I doing wrong.
- "When a metric becomes the target, it ceases to be a good measure".
- Dumb bureaucracy with dumb requirements will be met with corresponding response.
- Love it. This needs to become a new trend, and price per token can't rise soon enough.
by jorblumesea
2 subcomments
- Has anyone actually seen true business lift from agents or is this one of those "do stupid things faster" situation?
- 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.
by blindriver
1 subcomments
- 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.
- yesterday's front page: AI is making me dumb. today's front page: employees are making AI dumb. the circle is complete.
by ekjhgkejhgk
1 subcomments
- Happening at my company as well.
This is an early symptom of the future devaluation of the skill of developing software. The value is going down because there is too little software developing work for the number of people who currently can do it.
by mactavish88
0 subcomment
- Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
by buellerbueller
0 subcomment
- This seems like AI is the new ponzi scheme.
by Serhii-Set
0 subcomment
- [dead]
by jknoepfler
0 subcomment
- If GDP is going up, we must be wealthier and more productive, right? Surely? (/s)
Hacker News