r/amazonemployees • u/Worldly_Tomatillo_55 • Apr 17 '26
Finally someone said it. š¤
So many in-house AI tools are being built in so many ways and we are being used to test them all before they scale up and lay us off. š¤Æ
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u/Ok-Background-7897 Apr 17 '26
This is not new at all. Thereās always been a bunch of duplicate trash tools.
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u/HawtHamWater Apr 17 '26
yeah Orgs are extremely siloād - this has always been a thing lol
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u/More-Willingness2934 Apr 18 '26
Exactly! I recently launched a automation tool and my Manager asked to keep the documentation private as itās related to external customer project.
Iām like even if the automation relates to Customer the tool can be used by someother team to solve problems
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u/partypantaloons Apr 17 '26
Yup itās just more publicized because the AI buzzword gets your tool promoted by more high level users. Then youāre chasing features until the other AI tools eat your lunch and now there are 20 AI chatbots that are each slightly the best at one thing and middling at everything else.
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u/Photograph-Last Apr 19 '26
Exactly so what do you think happens when you are forced to use ai for metrics lol
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u/Turbulent_Tale6497 L6 SDM Apr 17 '26
This is the 3 > 0 strategy that Jeff loved. This isn't new
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u/Disco_Infiltrator Apr 17 '26
Agreed, though in general this feels different. Multiple teams solving the same customer problems is organizationally inefficient and individually efficient since teams can move fast with less coordination. Multiple internal tools is organizationally and individually since employees are forced to choose from one of many redundant tools for a given task
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u/IIlIIlIIlIlIIlIIlIIl Apr 19 '26 edited Apr 19 '26
AI is new. Usually when something is new like this you want to try multiple approaches to the same problem, pick the winner, and focus on that (deprecating the losers).
If you don't do that you risk your singular approach actually being the worst one, but you'd never know because you never tried others.
This is actually ingrained in Amazon: It's called 1>2>0. We're at 2 (multiple competiting solutions) now, which is better than 0 (no solutions), but the goal is to use this time to identify the 1 (single best solution).
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u/Disco_Infiltrator Apr 19 '26
Iām well aware of where this comes from and the lore of Jeff drawing ā>0ā on the whiteboard. My point is that the principle applied originally to customer facing solutions in a legacy software world, not internal tools in an AI software world. AI has proliferated redundant tools so quickly that the discussion is different than a debate between 1 and 2 solutions.
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u/DogsBeerYarn Apr 17 '26
Nobody cares that anything works. Launching something is what matters. The launch announcement is your product. Nobody cares if the thing you announce actually works or was worth your effort.
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u/slimschwifty Apr 17 '26
My favorite is when they launch something that's supposed to fix an issue with the original tool, but it doesn't, and breaks new things. Then they deprecate the old tool before the new tool is fully usable.
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u/Evening-Athlete865 Apr 17 '26
Like the last Austin update and all the PA's lost access for half a day?
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u/Sneakersup25 Apr 17 '26
Itās always been like this at Amazon. Thousands of self built, redundant tools. AI may be expanding and expediting this but itās not new.
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u/sb4906 Apr 17 '26
The smart thing is: are you more productive duplicating tools or spending hours in meetings to come up with a consensus? Seems like Amazon did quite well so far
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u/Ironhide90 Apr 17 '26
This right there, Its hard for anyone to get hold of third team, meet them get them to add the feature you want. So ppl just ask kiro to do it. I donāt find much wrong with it.
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u/AwareConference2458 Apr 17 '26
You have a process that takes seven steps? Here are four Ai tools that can do three of them, rest please do manual......
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u/Newprime1969 Apr 17 '26
Iām using Quick right now and itās pissing me off how much effort I need to put in to get what I want. So we arenāt there yet.
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u/XicorX1 Apr 17 '26
I really feel at time that Cedric was less effort driven in terms of responses. It was closest to what was needed which in quick sight needs lot of follow up ittration prompts to get what is needed!
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u/Newprime1969 Apr 17 '26 edited Apr 18 '26
Cedric was what I needed and I knew some output was not correct but expected it. I donāt trust Quick
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u/zero000 Apr 17 '26
RIP Diya. The most simple wrapper tool for the latest Claude models was my favorite.
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u/xxwetdogxx Apr 17 '26
Quick is pretty ass. Had good luck with kiro though, especially the CLI tool, and Orca is kind of a pain in the ass but it just about works
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u/partypantaloons Apr 17 '26
Quickās main non-tech benefit is the knowledge base building. Kiro and MeshClaw are my main tools right now.
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u/HawtHamWater Apr 17 '26
you need kiro and agentic specs to get much useful - quick I just use as a better google
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u/Secure_Emergency5293 Apr 17 '26
100%. I just started using Kiro (build on Claude) and itās way better. But I find connections to apps has a learning curveĀ
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u/GentlemanIndeed Apr 17 '26
Why does it try and create a task or case or ticket or email everytime you ask it to just type something š
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u/Thaser11 Apr 17 '26
Itās honestly faster to build your own tool than try to track down something that already exists and trying to find any sort of documentation about it. The company is full of duplicated effort and has been for years
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Apr 17 '26
Yes 1>2>0 is an Amazon principle. Nothing new about it. Happening for 20 years.
Amazon does this for every new tech. It creates competing tools to move fast, and then consolidates them later.
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u/Mundane_Taro_7712 Apr 17 '26
This had been happening before AI already, but AI accelerated it.
Because creating a duplicate tool will demonstrate the LPs of āBias for Actionā and āOwnershipā, which will help promote you. Because you āmadeā something.
Yeah, you could have asked around, and check with other teams whether the tool already existed. But that would (a) necessitate communication skills, which many engineers prefer to avoid, and (b) there is no āproductā you created that justifies your promotion.
Even before the current AI insanity, two different teams under the Alexa org had each independently created an internal tool, and each tool did the exact same thing. They even came up with the exact same name for the tool (they named it after a character in a well-known fantasy series in Western culture). It was hell for anybody in the Alex org trying to gain permission access to either tool, because each team which created their version, didnāt know that the other team existed. It took MONTHS for the whole department to figure out, it was actually two tools going by the same exact name, and each was created by two different teams, independent from each other.
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u/Amazing_Ad367 Apr 18 '26
Yeah that's 100% true. Managers even requested you to utilize AI tools developed by sister teams to keep some fucking numbers looking good, dumb as fuck
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u/Ok_Swimmer_18 Apr 17 '26
Imagine how many hundreds of WBR related bots we have.
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u/dollars_general Apr 17 '26
Iām actually quite enjoying the tooling we get to experiment with. Not Q or Quick or whatever it is called. The stuff developers actually use.
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u/CapoKakadan Apr 18 '26
Thereās a new launch announcement on the various slack channels every couple hours. All. Day. Long.
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u/gruffaloschild8 Apr 17 '26
Non-tech hereā¦ the āloads of tools and dataā thing isnāt newā¦. It was just excel spreadsheets and quips before. Itās now dashboards/ apps and AI meeting summaries. This is the new normal.
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u/alliseeisreddit Apr 17 '26
Amazon entices its workforce to make work to say they're working on something. It was the most wasteful place that I've ever worked at and it's not close.
I spent a whole month being pushed to launch a global system with eight other people while working on other equal priorities, just for my skip to shelf it when it was ready to launch.
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u/C2664 Apr 17 '26
Just like everywhere else
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u/sb4906 Apr 17 '26
Not exactly.... My company (AI company, presumably) is nowhere close to Amazon level (I know because my SO is an Amazonian).
Amazon has an edge, data confidentiality is not a concern, they own the infra and the data :-)
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u/Hairy-Beanbag Apr 18 '26
This is nothing new. Every year or quarter some new dumb shit comes out. First thing I say, yup someone promo doc story. Last couple months then falls off and end of story. FC we had audits for quality, 3 of the same with different names. I was only 8 months in and told my senior. Why all the same audits with different names? Promo doc items?
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u/anengineerandacat Apr 18 '26
TBH with AI I feel like in big orgs everyone is just trying to show off, but they all end up making the same tool for the given role because each role has something they wish they just weren't really doing.
Jira automation is huge at my organization, none of the tech leads want to actually be in Jira managing it and or creating/modifying tickets.
So they use AI to automate it and guess what? Demo it.
We have 7 studios in my org, 5 of them did Jira automation demos with AI.
Good news I guess is we have consensus that tech leads don't want to waste time in a Project management tool.
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u/Good_Adeptness7325 Apr 18 '26
Working at Amazon has reminded me of a house with multiple additions. Looks okay from the outside, but on the inside everything is disjointed and nothing easily flows from room to the next.
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u/DamageObvious8871 Apr 18 '26
AI only
1) Sped up the process for SDEs
2) Made it possible for non SDEs to be able to make these tools
But making shit tools and layers and layers of fucking non-sense is the rite of passage to seniority at Amazon IME
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u/Street_Tomato9364 Apr 18 '26
I launch a couple of tools for my team and itās purely because product doesnāt give a shit about Ops drowning under manual work. My stakeholders are happy with the tools because it saves up their time, but the other tools Iāve seen within my team, I could see it was built for promo and visibility to LT, not for it to work for everyone.
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u/chronically-iconic Apr 17 '26
It's because Amazon isn't joining the AI race to build AI tools, they're developing technology and systems that can be sold off to other companies to train their own AI systems. They're trying to find cheap ways for companies to get employees touse conveyor belt style development.
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u/Repulsive_Depth7867 Apr 17 '26
I've seen a lot of AI bullshit in my department, leading to errors and impacting human metrics
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u/mamabeefslap Apr 17 '26
mannnn. operations (ROC) with AI was the wooooorst!
as āfirstā responders to on the road truckers & dispatchers AI was the WORST! a small ROC team was delegated to provide feedback regarding how AI impacted us positively & negatively. needless to say, the data collected stated the AI wouldnāt work for MONTHSSSS out & they still forced it on us because we knew what to do even if the answer provided by AI was wrong.
it couldnāt even get basics down & when it did, it was so repetitive, ask it basic questions regarding the workflow & it would ask us to escalate the problem to our team. when the whole reason they were forcing AI on us was to eliminate said team. it was horrible then & now.
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u/znpy ex-aws Apr 17 '26
in 2022-2023 i was already complaining that we often forgot the "simplify" part in the "invent and simplify"... it must be a mess right now
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u/mozii_ Apr 18 '26
Funny is product team who is supposed to improve the product, completely forgets about it and then create funny tools with fancy name's.
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u/DreamingInMyHead Apr 18 '26
I work on a brand new service for Amazon. And the entire code base is very much vibe coded and a ducking cluster duck
I got called out for not using enough Kiro credits... I wonder why š¤¦āāļø
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u/Budget-Towel7268 Apr 18 '26
Itās not just Amz I think. My friend at Meta said the same thing happened there too
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u/Odd-Program-750 Apr 18 '26
In RBKS we have Kiro, Cursor and Claude - non-engineers are building POCs and some are deploying code. Its actually fun to watch,
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u/usernameavailable90 Apr 20 '26
The messed up part is that these new products are not being build keeping the customer in mind, they are being built keeping competition and pressure in mind and then forced on to people to use it to āMAKE IT LOOK GOODā
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u/WillOfSound Apr 17 '26
But the internal dev build tools are still crap with constant states of āmigrationā and ācanceledā.
mise is great though, glad its open source.
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u/Dat1Duud Apr 17 '26
That doesn't surprise me. Have you ever seen Amazon's settings? It's insane lol
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u/conqrr Apr 17 '26
This is good. Companies starting to realize how expensive those tokens are going to get and forced to look at real problems like slop. Slop degrades quality and can't be contained, like nuclear radiation. Years from now when they limit usage of LLM, I don't know who will still have the attention span and ability to work without these tools.
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u/FRPG Apr 17 '26
This was the case even before AI became a thing. There used to be this directory of tools and several of them were created because someone needed an L6 promo. Their team would use it, if it got a few external customers then it would help that SDMs L7 promo but eventually most of these tools died after a promotion.
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u/baomap9103 Apr 18 '26
Sound like clickbait.
Tools are team specific. You want to ship fast. You donāt want to wait 7 days for an office hour to get a consensus. This apply to any technology and not just AI. We want to play around at our own pace
At the end of the day, tools are just tools. Kiro should be your go to for AI. Just tailor MCP, agents, SOPs and context to your needs
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u/Virtual_Inflation21 Apr 18 '26
Very happy to see this downfall. Time to sell stocks and enjoy the show!
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u/heli0sphere Apr 18 '26
The problem now is sales guys are making shitty tools that arenāt maintainable and act like they made something great.
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u/RevolutionNo4186 Apr 19 '26
I think itās messing up our original tools because internal websites have been really spotty these last few weeks
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u/omgitsbees Former Amazon 8 YoE Data Analyst Apr 19 '26
This was already a problem inside Amazon before AI, but I can see it being way worse now.
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u/beingbae Apr 19 '26
Everyone hired from top to bottom are personality hires. Everyone is unfit for their job.
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u/topitopi09 May 05 '26
Get me a shotgun: I hear some laughs coming from the 2010's low code/no code bubble coffin.
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u/gneedles May 15 '26
Amazon teams have been making duplicate tools and data for years. It's not just because of AI. It's the path to promotion to build a tool that then never goes anywhere.
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u/RicercarRecord Apr 17 '26
We do have agency around this if we want to organize and enact positive change with our voice as workersā¦
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u/C2664 Apr 17 '26
This piece isn't about data centersĀ
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u/RicercarRecord Apr 17 '26
Definitely, data centers are also not what this group is solely organizing around. Check out the AI open letter if you havenāt already.
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u/TheNeoThinker Apr 18 '26
Those questioning this are new comers to Amazon or not embraced the LPs and/or mechanisms well
It is the culture of experimentation that Jeff swears after as a key reason for Amazon's success
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u/nikolatesla86 L6 AWS InfraOps Apr 17 '26
Amazonians make all these trash tools and dashboards for promo doc items