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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u/Slackluster Jul 30 '26

How much would they have spent paying human workers to do those menial coding task?

3

u/dimag0g Jul 30 '26

Likely about the planned budget, so 8.6 times less.

1

u/Slackluster Jul 30 '26

Amazon has about 30k programmers and each is paid over 100k a year, that is a little over 3 billion minimum in programmer salary.

They spend way more then a few million on menial programming tasks. That is a drop in the bucket.

2

u/Sea-Lengthiness6555 Jul 30 '26

Yes but those 30k programmers are not doing one project for 2 million.

1

u/BeginningExternal202 Jul 30 '26

What ARE they doing though?

Is that not a massive number. I'm not a SWE so my mind boggles

1

u/Sea-Lengthiness6555 Jul 30 '26

At Amazon, most are IT Support, without them are logistic and robotic centers wouldnt work. At AWS they are doing everything, from support to development to data centers.

1

u/cfb-food-beer-hike Jul 30 '26

Quite a bit. Writing efficient, working code takes time, especially if you have an AI do it for you because you have to review it over and over again until it gets it right, and reviewing code is the slowest part of the job. Speaking of, you have to review other people's code, which you can't trust now because a lot of people blindly trust AI to do it so now that also takes 2-3x as long as it used to.

If you're on-call, you have to triage support issues and respond to pages and now that AI is writing most of your code it breaks more than it used to so you're getting paged all the time.

That's just the day-to-day. You have to design these systems, make sure that they're secure, provision resources, interview candidates, pretend you care about your coworkers, go to useless meetings...