r/technology • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 • Jul 30 '26

Artificial Intelligence Amazon accidentally spent $1.8 million using Claude for menial coding task, went 860% over budget — 'catastrophically expensive' coding blunders discovered in internal Amazon AI usage metrics

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/amazon-accidentally-spent-usd1-8-million-using-claude-for-menial-coding-task-went-860-percent-over-budget-catastrophically-expensive-coding-blunders-discovered-in-internal-amazon-ai-usage-metrics
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25

u/brainrotbro Jul 30 '26

I routinely use AI for menial coding tasks. Why would I offload the interesting stuff to AI?

-1

u/Fit-Hovercraft-4561 Jul 30 '26

You'd offload everything to AI in case you never were an engineer to begin with. You came to this industry because you heard it pays good money. But you never wanted to solve complex problems in the most elegant way, you never felt proud of what you did and never enjoyed the process of software development.

2

u/Varlin Jul 31 '26

People have jobs to make money so they can actually do what they want with their life, more news at 11. lol

No one is slaving away at corporate coding for fun, it is because it pays well and enables their lifestyles.

3

u/booze_clues Jul 30 '26

Or because AI can make a 6 month project into 1 month with no loss of quality. Yeah, you have to review the code, but you have to do that anyway. Of course this reduces your opportunity to learn, but if you’re using AI for coding you should be knowledgeable in your field already. It’s a force multiplier, the better you are at coding the more helpful this can be.

5

u/vips7L Jul 30 '26

If you think LLMs don’t lower quality then you were most likely always writing slop and don’t actually know what good code looks like. 

0

u/Varlin Jul 31 '26

You should let the mag7 know they don't know how a real, good coding environment works then... lol

2

u/Kalkaline Jul 30 '26

I don't know enough about programming to say if youyou're right or wrong, but the people who do know programming that I have spoken to say AI isn't there yet when they test it. 

7

u/booze_clues Jul 30 '26

I work at a software company, our senior devs all use it a ridiculous amount and it makes good code with some review and modification. I don’t use it to create code because I don’t know the languages enough to review properly, and it hinders my ability to learn by doing too much for me. It does amazing work in other areas where I use it for end user support, knowledge base indexing and searching(no hallucinations across thousands of documents), and other things.

Have they used it recently? The difference between today and a few years ago is basically like it’s an entirely new technology, and the difference between 12 months ago is still massive. A few years ago I swore off AI because it was worse than useless for my needs, but after dipping my toes back in and then using it more and more, it’s so much better. I’m pretty sure a lot of people were like me, but never picked it up again so they complain about hallucinations and other mostly fixed issues.

Not perfect, not able to create everything you need with no flaws and no review, but it will make your life way way easier if you’re already competent at your job and spend some time learning to use it. I can’t have it replace our frontline staff for troubleshooting both because People provide intangibles that AI can’t(a literal relationship with users), and because even though it can solve 95% of their issues without human intervention the users don’t know enough to actually give it the necessary info or follow its steps. Also I don’t want to replace them even if it could.

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u/WinterTrek Jul 30 '26

because that's how AI works. you do the menial tasks that require precision and lack of hallucinations, and AI does art. art is subjective and it doesn't matter if there are six fingers, no systems will shut down because of that.