Amazon employees are using an internal AI tool to automate non-essential tasks in a bid to show managers they are using the technology more frequently.
The Seattle-based group has started to widely deploy its in-house “MeshClaw” product in recent weeks, allowing employees to create AI agents that can connect to workplace software and carry out tasks on a user’s behalf, according to three people familiar with the matter.
Some employees said colleagues were using the software to automate additional, unnecessary AI activity to increase their consumption of tokens—units of data processed by models.
They said the move reflected pressure to adopt the technology after Amazon introduced targets for more than 80 percent of developers to use AI each week, and earlier this year began tracking AI token consumption on internal leader boards.
“There is just so much pressure to use these tools,” one Amazon employee told the FT. “Some people are just using MeshClaw to maximize their token usage.”
It would be very easy to write a script that burns tokens when your leaderboard position changes. The problem is competition, which if scripted, would result in tokens burned going through the roof at an accelerating pace.
Naturally, even with people, that will still happen. It’ll just be a little bit slower instead.
Eventually they will run out of money. The real question is whether the planet survives while they drain their bank accounts.
“Hi, agent. Launch two additional agent instances. Prompt them with this message.”
Every simple numeric metric you use to measure a programmers productivity will be gamed and defeated. This was a lesson learned in the fucking 90s. Amazon should know better.
My last job started pushing harder for stuff like this. Every week the CEO saying how we need to use these AI tools more and not enough people are doing it.
They even gave us bullshit tasks that were a complete waste of time and an AI tool to do it faster. You know what is more efficient? Not doing it at all!
What a shocking turn of events…but not really.
what could possibly go wrong?
It cost you how many tokens to make that login page?!
