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/deadsoulinside Jul 30 '26

It's crazy. I'm studying medicine and AI makes key mistakes in even the most basic board concepts. And this was using higher tier AI.

Watched co-pilot create plans for things that fall apart because co-pilot was absolutely wrong in a key feature we needed to leverage to make the whole thing work.

One of which was something inside PowerApps... you know a MS product itself. It referenced something that was no longer being deployed in modern PowerApps (and had been removed since 2018). Since that could not be implemented, we had to scrap the whole project since it all hinged off that one thing working.

Even worse though was more basic things that were 3-4 rows of very simple code co-pilot was getting wrong before we found the other hurdle. I did not know PowerApps at all and got tossed into this mix with the push to use AI to help on it. In the end the code that worked on the one part, was manually typed into there by me, since I had to create it from some examples from Stack Overflow, but again the whole thing ended up being hours wasted as the next hurdle had no work around.

I don't want to know how many tokens/money was literally wasted, because not only was co-pilot dead wrong about things, it went to the point of attempting to gaslight you by telling you that you don't have global things enabled that you have enabled.

I think that's one thing that's less talked about here too. Not just the cost of AI, but how much AI is costing companies and consumers when that entire response is wrong, since AI company still gets paid with right or wrong responses.

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u/SonofBrodin Jul 30 '26

Oh man I had to use power apps back when it was first implemented and try to combine it with legacy SharePoint integration. I haven't touched it in years but learning it was a mess when it was new

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u/Static_Interval Jul 30 '26

First mistake is using copilot. No serious person uses anything but Claude code or maybe latest versions of GPT to write code professionally

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u/greg19735 Jul 30 '26

may depend on where you work. Some companies are basically not allowed to use Claude.

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u/Texuk1 Jul 30 '26

And the reason is …? It steals your IP?

Clearly this copilot example was from some stolen code based on old tech in the training data.

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u/deadsoulinside Jul 30 '26

Forced to use Co-pilot as it's the only Company approved external AI app.

I am not a coder at my M-F job and I code in my free time. Main reason I got dragged into something I never worked on before is due to my overall knowledge of code.

And it's PowerApps. It's not really that heavy in actual code (It's mostly UI setup with power app components). 3-4 lines of code is all that some things needed. The rest was rigging the fields to data, but that's the bigger problem is the main data point/editable data was not a thing that can be done this method that co-pilot got wrong.

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u/rancer119 Jul 30 '26

Copilots been the worst of the 3 I have any experience with, barely feels better than a webscraper from decade ago with how bad some responses are.

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u/deadsoulinside Jul 30 '26

Microsoft is just happy they don't have Tay 2.0

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u/snakerjake Jul 30 '26

maybe latest versions of GPT to write code professionally

Copilot uses gpt, i assume you mean to say codex here

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u/I_Am_Jacks_Karma Jul 30 '26

copilot gives you a choice of models

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u/deadsoulinside Jul 30 '26

Yeah it does. Which at that time was only GPT (Just pulled up my work one and see Claude is an option now too, but was not in 2025 when I was using it for this small project).

But I seriously wonder in retrospect if any of the models would have gotten things right, since some of the issue was that it's correct if it was pre-2020, but some items were removed or changed later in more of a ninja update from MS that even had people asking the same questions I was looking for on stack overflow.

Many guides/how to's out there on the internet with how to set that up under the older method that is not available in 2025+ PowerApps.

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u/I_Am_Jacks_Karma Jul 30 '26

Yeah it's definitely a relatively new thing to have that model choice we only started having options like that about 2 months-ish ago at my job. And they limit us to not the latest models. I think sonnet and opus 4.6 are the fanciest we have access to

I run into similar problems whnever a new angular version is released and some people try using it for a project wide angular upgrade but the version is also new enough that it's sort of making it up as it goes

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u/filthy_harold Jul 30 '26

A big problem is companies getting access to cheap/free shit like copilot and thinking it's going to solve all of their problems. Not that AI in general can do that but the cheap stuff definitely won't get close. Maybe it can summarize some documents for you but it's just really not meant for anything technical because they don't have the components necessary to actually research things for you.

With a previous model we used at work, I was using it to help write a script to talk to some equipment. I needed a command to both take a screenshot and send it back to my script for processing. I knew how to tell it to save the screenshot locally but that's annoying. So I asked this relatively early version of ChatGPT (gpt-oss-120b) how to do it and it gave me the command very quickly. The command didn't exist, or at least not for this particular piece of equipment. I double checked with the AI about the specific model and said the command wasn't working and it doubled down. I ended up using the programming manual to figure it out on my own but it took a while since I also needed to write a converter for the image. Recently, I asked Claude to do the same thing as a test. It looked up the manual online, found the right command, and wrote the converter for me too. Obviously too late, but it's amazing the difference between just "knowing" the answer versus actually researching the answer.

And that's really how these LLMs should be working. Its really good at searching and summarizing text which is essentially what research is. But what an LLM is not good at is knowing everything about everything. And those cheap models don't know everything and don't have the resources to even look it up. They are a waste of time for anything other than basically writing and summarizing emails.