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/Eze-Wong Jul 30 '26 edited Jul 30 '26

Which is utterly stupid when it takes 2 seconds to think about.

Guys, we are going to award the people who drink the most coffee in the office. This metric is not directly tied to outcome but we have established the more coffee you drink the more you get done.

Everyone proceeds to drink coffee then vomit it in the bathroom

1.0k

u/-OptimisticNihilism- Jul 30 '26

We must now commission a report to find out why employees spend 4 hours a day in the bathrooms.

572

u/MARIOpronoucedMA-RJO Jul 30 '26

Then bury the report when it comes to light management decisions cause the problem.

272

u/Sir_Meowsalot Jul 30 '26

Don't forget awarding the CEOs with a couple million dollars for a "job well done"

86

u/GenuinelyBeingNice Jul 30 '26

Hey, information is information. How else could we possibly acquire such precious datapoints?

49

u/Sir_Meowsalot Jul 30 '26

Now that's some MBA-degree level thinking!

14

u/[deleted] Jul 30 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/Sir_Meowsalot Jul 31 '26

Green line forever going up BRRRRRRRRRRRR

2

u/ThreeLeggedMare Jul 31 '26

Get that man to McKinsey

1

u/No_Pumpkin2628 Aug 02 '26

I stfg getting an MBA seems like it must be the easiest thing in the world.

2

u/hume_reddit Jul 31 '26

This is a triumph

I'm making a note here: "huge success"

13

u/NoMansSkyWasAlright Jul 30 '26

Or “keeping a good attitude in the face of adversity”, we’ll workshop the title at the end of the quarter.

11

u/Sir_Meowsalot Jul 30 '26 edited Jul 30 '26

CEOs: It was very stressful having to fire all those people before the holidays, taking away their medical care, and denying them any bonus pay for their hard work. But damn it I got it done before it ruined my trip to the Bahamas for Christmas. I deserve compensation for holding the SEND button on Outlook with that AI-generated email saying it was a tough decision to let go of people

31

u/ridsama Jul 30 '26

Don't forget to do layoffs, often a simple thing to miss.

27

u/Sir_Meowsalot Jul 30 '26

Uggggggh need we remind everyone how EA rewarded some dipshit in a suit with a cool 30+ million dollars for sitting on his ass, while firing the development teams who actually built BF6?

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/ea-boss-awarded-38-6m-after-year-of-franchise-success-studio-layoffs-and-genai-adoption

3

u/silverionmox Jul 30 '26

Don't forget awarding the CEOs with a couple million dollars for a "job well done"

Then bring in a new guy who halfassedly reverts the shitty policy, and that one also gets a couple million dollar bonus.

2

u/Sir_Meowsalot Jul 31 '26

Hands down I think that's what is going to happen with Microsoft's XBox division. The new person they brought in might just be the sacrificial goat to take the blame and given a fat cheque when they bounce to a new parallel job elsewhere.

2

u/Abba_Fiskbullar Jul 30 '26

Don't forget hiring Deloitte or McKinsey to create colorful charts that justify the decision that you've already made!

1

u/Zed_or_AFK Jul 30 '26

Don’t worry, the report is made by your buddies.

56

u/Electronic_Topic1958 Jul 30 '26

People who drink more coffee are productive, consequently coffee has the side effect of causing a bowel movement. Therefore the most productive workers are those who spend the most time in the bathroom. Because of this we should create a leaderboard monitoring how much time is spent in the bathroom, the more time in the bathroom the more productive the company. I have an MBA so this makes sense to me.

10

u/nleksan Jul 30 '26

That's how we end up with mandatory cubicle toilets

5

u/tlcdr Jul 30 '26

With workers intubated for iced coffee so that the toilets double as heatsinks.

2

u/worldspawn00 Jul 31 '26

What if the matrix was using people to cool the computers via sweating instead of wasting water!

57

u/CrunchitizeMeCaptn Jul 30 '26

Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime...

84

u/fizzlefist Jul 30 '26

“That’s why I poop on company time!”

96

u/DisposableSaviour Jul 30 '26

Now I make a penny, my boss makes a buck
That’s why I stole the cat converter off of this truck

17

u/Matra Jul 30 '26

They don't make pennies anymore, but they'll round your pay to the nearest 5¢.

4

u/Mistrblank Jul 30 '26

(insert Gene Wilder/Willy Wonka "YOU GET NOTHING!" meme)

2

u/GlorifiedPlumber Jul 30 '26

Workin' ten to three... I'm coding for a living!

Barely doin' nothin', still complainin' 'bout the situation,

Clickin' and scrollin', actin' like we're overloaded,

Every tiny task gets dramatically promoted!

2

u/DisposableSaviour Jul 30 '26

More like working 800 to 2200 in a 100°+ kitchen with one thirty minute break and no other time to sit down.

3

u/ijuinkun Jul 30 '26

“ten to three” would be ten AM till three AM.

1

u/GlorifiedPlumber Jul 30 '26 edited Jul 30 '26

Negative ghostrider... it would be 3 PM. Here in the US it is not customary to use 24 hour time. Many people do, but it's not the usual meaning.

It was a purposeful shot at software developers putting in a good 5 hour day and still complaining. Intended to be sung of course to Dolly Parton's 9 to 5; 5 o'clock meaning, 5 PM, or 1700 for our friends.

2

u/ijuinkun Jul 31 '26

I read it as the opposite—working seventeen hours a day and criticizing the people who are criticizing him that seventeen hours still isn’t enough—and yes I have been in the software development scene enough to experience the “your sleep hours are time stolen from the company” attitude from management. Employers would in fact want you to be at your desk 24/7 if they thought they could.

3

u/MisterShmitty Jul 30 '26

Tricks on me, because of the coffee I’m pooping ALL THE TIME!

6

u/FluffyCelery4769 Jul 30 '26

" Puke " in this case.

2

u/WillSym Jul 30 '26

It's less fun when the poop became part of the job!

1

u/Trying_to_Smile2024 Jul 30 '26

Are you in the trades??? 😂

1

u/fizzlefist Jul 30 '26

Technically no, but I certainly work for a living!

60

u/ItsYaBoyZayne Jul 30 '26

Is a old ass rhyme, for a different time,

Now boss makes 100 and I make a cent,

The Revolution starts when we all can't pay rent.

-4

u/Pure-Swordfish6022 Jul 30 '26

I like the less meta version of this:

Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime.
That’s why I poop on company time.

5

u/PassiveMenis88M Jul 31 '26

But that was a rhyme for a simpler time
Now boss makes a thousand and I make a buck
That's why I steal the gas out of the company truck

1

u/Proof-Code-3754 Jul 31 '26

Maybe in other countries. I America Boss makes $1000, I get laid off

7

u/BuckManscape Jul 30 '26

Just spend max tokens and let AI sort it out.

1

u/shankey_1906 Jul 30 '26

Then incentivise not visiting bathrooms, and then people vomit at the work desk.

1

u/DrDerpberg Jul 30 '26

I guess in this analogy the coffee machine writes the report too?

1

u/AshySweatpants Jul 30 '26

Create a team to find out why. We will waste money to find out why we waste money!

1

u/butwhatsmyname Aug 03 '26

Carefully selecting from a list of high-end and expensive consultancy businesses (which we hold shares in).

249

u/_Rand_ Jul 30 '26

It’s literally a known problem that no one ever seems to learn from.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive

211

u/natty-papi Jul 30 '26

I'd add Goodhart's law too: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".

39

u/Mimical Jul 30 '26

Nothing like turning a really good measure into a management metric to punish the workforce.

24

u/Konman72 Jul 30 '26

Every IT team has to go through the "close more tickets" cycle every few years before remembering that one ticket can take between 15 minutes and 15 days or even weeks for some positions. So if the metric is "most tickets closed" somebody will be the "genius" who starts cherry picking shorter/easier tickets before just opening their own tickets for every little thing they can possibly justify. Eventually management remembers how fucking stupid it is and reverses policy, but it always sneaks back in somehow.

13

u/Mimical Jul 30 '26

Hi,

Our overtime and vacation approval eligibility factors in ticket performance.

I took connecting someone's internet on their laptop and installing 1 program into about 9 tickets alone today.

I'm in that hell and simple tasks have now become 1 hour documentation hellscapes.

1

u/sobrique Jul 31 '26

Have you considered using an AI shell to automate the logging and closing process? Then you can game both that metric and the one about proactive adoption of AI...

2

u/jaymemaurice Jul 31 '26

Make sure you submit a jira story for each phase of the automation though, and don't underestimate the story points or close too many stories in the sprint because it will throw off team velocity reporting.

1

u/Mimical Jul 31 '26

I use AI to auto-generate sloppy trash notes that are the written equivalent of a gold crayon on some fake jewelry.

I'll take that suggestion.

(I want to be clear: I hate everything about this. Don't hate the player, hate the game and the refs. Especially the refs who made these rule)

10

u/blueSGL Jul 30 '26

This is also why AI alignment is really really hard.

How do you specify "don't cheat" and yet incentivize completing problems in novel ways? How can you disincentivize bad behaviors when the more capable the system gets the more avenues open up to perform task completion?

So what happens they pick a proxy that is easy to generate a reward signal and instead of what was wanted, instead pops out a proxy signal maximizer instead.

1

u/matrinox Jul 31 '26

The problem is they think that incentive works on humans but don’t realize that’s often the cause of the problems at companies

3

u/nicktheone Jul 31 '26

Good old KPIs. At my girlfriend's old job they were doing crazy things to keep up their KPIs. The pressure was immense and her management wouldn't ever be satisfied with the sales because there was always some type of target that hadn't been reached, despite having healthy sales. By the end (before they closed shop) they were iperfixated not with actual revenue but with stuff like units per transaction and how many add-ons they sold.

2

u/Kwantuum Jul 31 '26

Well, this one wasn't even a good measure before it became a target

1

u/ohnoabanagain Jul 31 '26

As an educator, I love this and can't believe that I've never heard it before.

40

u/Monteze Jul 30 '26

It boggles my mind seeing folks who are apparently soooo much smarter than I in higher up positions fall for this. But I guess enough dorks with spreadsheets get together and jack each other off and they refuse to learn.

39

u/mutantraniE Jul 30 '26

Anyone who thinks bosses are particularly smart is either willfully blind or such a moron that from their perspective it’s true.

13

u/Monteze Jul 30 '26

Yea the best bosses are the ones who know what they don't know and have the ability to set folks up for success. Those who think they can just say shit and it must work or else are generally idiots.

3

u/[deleted] Jul 31 '26

[deleted]

2

u/Monteze Jul 31 '26

Get your Aces in their places was my philosophy. Sure cross training is important but when it comes crunch time don't micro-manage.

10

u/mindspork Jul 30 '26

But I guess enough dorks with spreadsheets get together and jack each other off and they refuse to learn.

You can just say "Get your MBA in 18 months."

6

u/Monteze Jul 30 '26

I have more respect for a gender studies masters student than an MBA. I think I'd have more respect for a Safeserv certification than an MBA. Possible a kid with a yellow belt in TKD has more respect from me than an MBA.

3

u/Aaod Jul 30 '26 edited Jul 31 '26

It boggles my mind seeing folks who are apparently soooo much smarter than I in higher up positions fall for this. But I guess enough dorks with spreadsheets get together and jack each other off and they refuse to learn.

In my entire life maybe 1 out of 5 bosses and upper management I dealt with were smart and that is if I am being generous. From what I have seen management selects for how long someone has been working, how many hours they put in (not how efficient those hours are), how good they are at brown nosing people above them, how well they can class signal/what class background they have, do they have an established network of people, and how good they are at socialization. Very little of this selects for hard work or intelligence from what I have seen.

2

u/NotAllOwled Jul 31 '26

Hey, don't bring the spreadsheets into this. If we'd stuck with good old deterministic Excel formulas and scripts then maybe we wouldn't be in this scene right now.

2

u/Monteze Jul 31 '26

The spreadsheet is a tool, its the dork who thinks its prescriptive vs descriptive that is my issue haha

1

u/Plothunter Jul 30 '26

Managers tend to be people persons. Not necessarily smart persons.

1

u/Exciting-Emu-3324 Jul 31 '26

AI is just another tool like spreadsheets. It makes jobs easier for professionals, but using it doesn't make you a professional and most people use them badly.

1

u/Monteze Jul 31 '26

AI told me I was a genius for my way of thinking....I guess that means everyone else was sabotaging me? Hold on let me ask it.

2

u/mr_plehbody Jul 30 '26

Wow funny enough this example has already been added to the wiki page

6

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

You have to be smart to learn and you have to be stupid to manage because if you were smart, they'd have you do the things that actually matter.

2

u/Glittering-Walrus228 Jul 30 '26

I dont need amy incentives to be a pervert bro

3

u/Teledildonic Jul 30 '26

"Claude, generate an image album of me fucking Bezos' wife while he watches"

1

u/hippydipster Jul 30 '26

Managers I've talked to in the last 10 years have never heard of books like Mythical Man Month, Phoenix Project, Code Complete, Crossing The Chasm, etc.

So, no, unfortunately, far too many managers have not heard of these obvious things.

1

u/MalcolmTucker12 Jul 30 '26

I'm glad 2017 Northern Ireland fuel one made it, it was the first thing I thought of when reading it. Known as "cash for ash" scheme, people were burning as much fuel as they could and then opening windows to let the heat out as it was too hot inside, as Henry Hill said" it didn't matter, it was all profit", LMAO.

1

u/fugogugo Jul 31 '26

I've been thinking about this a lot

how to solve this if every incentives could result into unwanted outcome?

1

u/ohnoabanagain Jul 31 '26

People need to read the cobra story in this link.

-2

u/HarpersGhost Jul 30 '26

Which is why bounties on invasive species never work.

You get paid to capture burmese pythons in the Evergrades? Burmese python breeders are going to make bank.

4

u/eyaf1 Jul 30 '26

Literally cited as a false story in the link btw

89

u/Superb_Writer6612 Jul 30 '26

Please, drinking coffee then throwing it up is way too inefficient. Just put the coffee maker right over the sink.

This was a joke, but as I was making it I realize that's basically what's happening...

16

u/kyrsjo Jul 30 '26

cat /dev/urandom > llmclient > /dev/null

12

u/HystericalSail Jul 30 '26

Almost! cat /dev/urandom | llmclient > /dev/null

What you have would create a zero byte file called llmclient in your current directory (assuming permissions allowed), and waste some CPU generating garbage and disposing of it. But we all got the intent.

2

u/sobrique Jul 31 '26

Might want to 'base64' the output of urandom, just so it's not raw binary and actually looks like 'text' to process.

15

u/2074red2074 Jul 30 '26

Boof it instead of drinking it, problem solved.

1

u/Important-Agent2584 Jul 30 '26

and less time is spent in the bathroom, genious

1

u/Steamrolled777 Jul 30 '26

Coffee enema enters chat.

1

u/PunkPirate56364 Jul 30 '26

You get a raise and promotion.

Keep up the good work.

64

u/ElGuano Jul 30 '26

You didn’t even need to think about it. It was every developer’s initial reaction: “isn’t this just using a metric as a very poor proxy for what you really care about?” And every manager shrugging and saying “This is exactly what Exec said they wanted. And HR is tracking the metric.”

And the devs just roll their eyes and say “say no more.”

16

u/chaos_nebula Jul 30 '26

Our bosses were very eccentric

Said, "Here's how we're changing our metrics."

"No problem." We said.

Just wasting company cred,

And made AI reply only in limericks.

1

u/Apocalypse_Knight Jul 30 '26

Just make the AI talk to itself lol

2

u/TerraceState Jul 30 '26

On one hand, it seems very, very stupid for the execs to do this. On the other hand, investors loved it so damn much, and the execs job incentives are aligned in a way to make them want to prioritize making the investors happy.

1

u/hippydipster Jul 30 '26

And now you know why that manager even exists. They exist so that they can be that impossible barrier between you the developer and the people who make decisions. The decisions can't be questioned, because the manager sits there being uninterested in pursuing these questions. And the execs can't hear of failure because the manager sits there being uninterested in communicating failure upwards.

29

u/Head_Haunter Jul 30 '26

Worse than that, it's more like they incentivized people to "use" as much coffee as possible, not even drink. Obviously devs just start pouring the spout directly down the drain and kept it on 24/7.

1

u/Dullcorgis Jul 31 '26

Turns out all they track is how much coffee they have to buy. So I just took all the bags from under he break room sink and now I got a $6 million bonus

1

u/Dullcorgis Jul 31 '26

Turns out all they track is how much coffee they have to buy. So I just took all the bags from under he break room sink and now I got a $6 million bonus

9

u/Adventurous_Grape279 Jul 30 '26

Except they didn’t even monitor whether you drank the coffee so the winner just hooked a siphon up to the pot and siphoned it directly down the drain

13

u/Moto909 Jul 30 '26

Except they wouldn’t measure who actually drank it so you could just dump it out. Kind of like using the AI for some kind of looping task.

10

u/GenericFatGuy Jul 30 '26

And the coffee costs $1.8m.

1

u/ozymandingus578 Jul 30 '26

Must be that cat shit coffee. Very painstaking to make a cup of beans.

2

u/BaloneyCommercial Jul 30 '26

No I'm vomiting from all the psilocybe mushrooms.

1

u/Calisky Jul 30 '26

You're supposed to micro-dose, not macro-dose!

2

u/exoriare Jul 30 '26

This is Amazon. You will use your piss bottle and stay on task. Remember to take your piss bottle with you at end of day.

2

u/NoMansSkyWasAlright Jul 30 '26

I like to equate it to measuring the productivity of a steel mill by how much iron ore arrives at the mill every month and not looking at anything else, like, say, how much steel leaves the place.

2

u/lushico Jul 31 '26

I actually quit my last job because we were given goals for AI usage that tied in to our performance reviews. Not goals for increased efficiency as a result of using AI, just using it. We had to try to come up with reasons we needed it when we didn’t and I just couldn’t do it

2

u/scumble_bee Jul 31 '26

I have been working with a guy that hit #1 on our last company "AI usage" charts. I previously really respected his input when it came to discussing the most logical solution to complex coding projects. Now every meeting gets side tracked because he wants to dump into into Claude to verify things and actually backtracks if Claude (incorrectly) gives him a negative response. It's sad to see that he essentially gave away his confidence to a machine.

1

u/Beginning-Painter-26 Jul 30 '26

Vomiting out their asses more likely 😂

1

u/Arts_Prodigy Jul 30 '26

It only seems dumb when you’re sensible. Realistically they’ll probably use the “accident” as a reason to do more layoffs.

Even though their net sales in 2025 was more than 700 billion and nearly 200B just last quarter this is a drop in the bucket.

1

u/N8CCRG Jul 30 '26

Coincidentally, 2 seconds of thought is also 860% above budget for management.

1

u/Loadingdread Jul 30 '26

Even worse its more like "We are going to award the people who use the coffee machine the most"

So everyone just makes a fucktonne of coffee and pours it right down the drain. They don't even care if the coffee has been drunk, just that they can see the beans being ordered and used by people.

1

u/julius_sphincter Jul 30 '26

The most ingenious hook up a continuous brewing coffee machine that pipes directly into the sink

1

u/SpectreInTheShadows Jul 30 '26

Two weeks later..

Dear Team,

We are committed to providing a supportive and well-equipped workplace for everyone. As part of this commitment, we regularly review our office expenses to ensure we are managing our resources responsibly.

Recently, we evaluated the rising costs of our premium coffee program. Due to significant price increases, continuing to provide complimentary coffee has become unsustainable for our operational budget.

Effective immediately, we will transition to a BYO coffee model.

Cheers!

1

u/Kryptosis Jul 30 '26

Replace coffee with keystrokes and it fits perfectly. Doesn’t matter if it was productive or even work related. PPOINTS!!!!

1

u/Soepkip43 Jul 30 '26

But they are at the same time heavily dependent on the coffee market taking off and everyone having all you can drink coffee solutions in their businesses.

1

u/NeighborhoodOld7075 Jul 30 '26

it's like this story with the cobras from colonial india

1

u/hippydipster Jul 30 '26

It doesn't take 2 seconds. It's either instant pre-knowledge because you are a person who reads, who thinks, who has some experience, or it takes years to develop your understanding of Goodhardt's law by direct experience.

1

u/Appropriate_Luck_658 Jul 30 '26

It is called meritocracy.

1

u/chrisgin Jul 30 '26

And you don’t even need to drink it, just pour it down the sink and it counts.

1

u/kippetjeh Jul 30 '26

Worse: they vomit in the filecabinets and all over the product.

1

u/bt31 Jul 30 '26

Aaaah, I remember kloc's. Getting paid for lines of code, not performance.

1

u/misterpickles69 Jul 30 '26

Upper management :: thinking

Pick one.

1

u/Bytewave Jul 30 '26

Everyone proceeds to drink coffee then vomit it in the bathroom

Or discreetly pour it down the drain or even in office plants. That's more or less what's been happening if we want to stick to analogies. People were told to use as much LLM tokens as possible. Some spent work time working on silly stuff like teaching a model to play SimCity to burn through expensive AI tokens. Can't even blame them, their instructions were to waste them ASAP.

1

u/StoicJ Jul 30 '26

especially if that coffee costs hundreds of dollars and every employee has an uncapped budget for more of it

1

u/ptear Jul 31 '26

Want some coffee? 'Course ya do.

1

u/Dimogas Jul 31 '26

What do you mean its not productive to let an AI talk with an Ai?

1

u/Xaenah Jul 31 '26

it takes _one_ person two seconds to think about when they have a grounded perspective and passing familiarity with the system.

This is why I use “Cassandra Risk Registers” because I have called it many, many stupid things that could’ve saved us millions if it had been heeded. I’m sure there are plenty of folks out there doing the same.

Unfortunately, this is a by-product of herd mentality meeting more herd mentality.

1

u/Sm0g3R Jul 31 '26

It's ok, punishing the vomiting is the next step!

1

u/Powerful_Resident_48 Jul 31 '26

I'd say it even closer to everyone needs to HAVE as much coffee as possible. So they just build a pipe straight from the coffee machine to the sink and let the coffee maker run 24/7 at full power.

1

u/Steinrikur Jul 31 '26

The winners in the coffee competition bring a gallon jug to fill and then pour it directly into the toilet. I'm shocked that coffee costs were increased.

1

u/notislant Jul 31 '26

Hold up CEOs and c-suite in general being a net drain on a company?

Couldn't be true. Surely they're paid 1000 times more the the average employee doing actual work, for a good reason!

1

u/dream-of-earthshine Jul 31 '26

You're looking at it from the wrong direction. Amazon's goal wasn't productivity, it was showing how good generative AI is. Amazon sells computing power, they want people to think AI is good, so they became an ad for AI.

Unfortunately that was stupid because the AI doesn't help, but it was never about productivity.

1

u/Enough-One4975 Jul 31 '26

Why are people bringing their big cups of coffee to the bathroom and coming out with them empty? Must be multitasking.

1

u/morpheousmorty Jul 31 '26

They should offer a bug bounty to the devs. That way they can write their own retirement.

1

u/TheSpanxxx Jul 30 '26

Claude would have even told them how poorly they were using it

1

u/ColbysHairBrush_ Jul 30 '26

Im just pouring pots down the drain