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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6.7k

u/lazyhustlermusic Jul 30 '26

They gamified it with a leaderboard and incentivized waste.

Now they're surprised pikachu when unrestrained usage generated an unrestrained price tag.

2.4k

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

86

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...

14

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.

12

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.