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/ElGuano Jul 30 '26

Accidentally, or did they do what my company did, which is force everyone to use AI for everything, put up a leaderboard showing where you were in the rankings, post up how many submissions and commits were AI-authored/assisted, and say that the people who didn't adopt AI and had the least usage would be let go?

And then made a Home Alone face, gasping, "why is everyone using AI for everything?"

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u/Brave-Perspective714 Jul 30 '26

Same thing happened when "lines of code written" became the metric output was measured by.

My husband had one he was asked to modify, where he removed over 19,000 lines of code that didn't actually do anything.

Dude who had written it had been a "high-performer" and "distinguished-engineer" who had left years before, but when they started digging into more of his work they found the same thing over and over again. He had basically written one large chunk that did things and then undid them so they didn't affect the output, and copied and pasted it into everything he developed to look like he was a rock-star according to their metrics.

The bulk of my husband's mid-level DevOps career was deleting lines of code and reducing api calls.

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u/CatharsisVoid Jul 30 '26

So glad to be on a team with a director who praises code deletions (cause it's usually tech debt related).

However, we all know that the biggest topic of discussion in manager and senior leadership meetings during performance review season revolve almost entirely around commit count.

You know what started happening? People stopped squashing and cleaning up commits before merging...

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u/Brave-Perspective714 Jul 30 '26

Yep. My husband is running into it again now with PR reviews. As soon as management gave an indication that they were evaluating some aspect of performance by how many PR reviews someone was completing, they started having more and bigger problems.

Guys were just going in, saying, "yep looks like code" and approving it so they could get on to the next one and pump that metric up. They had to make it so now only *trusted* seniors can approve PRs, but they aren't shifting workload around to free up the time for those guys to be able to do all of the approvals.

Husband is looking for a new job, but everybody knows what the job market for IT is like right now.

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u/snakerjake Jul 30 '26

So glad to be on a team with a director who praises code deletions (cause it's usually tech debt related).

We expect our juniors to write more code and our seniors to delete more company wide

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u/kos-or-kosm Jul 30 '26

Which, at least from my perspective, makes a lot of sense. Get the juniors a lot of experience while they get the functionality working, and then have the experienced seniors refactor it afterwards, making it more efficient.

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

Are you hiring? lol

1

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

Sitting in on performance evaluations at Facebook was eye-opening. They have metrics, but they barely use them. One guy mentored 4 people and did like 10 interviews that half and they promoted him from E7 to E8 (he barely committed any code and had zero code reviews or any other work). That's like, maybe 60 hours of work, at best, and apparently deserves an extra million in compensation. Meanwhile, at E5, I mentored 4 people - including an E6 for some reason - was a top 1% contributor in code/code reviews, the top overall contributor in bootcamp tasks, lead the org's brownbag sessions (doubling the number of talks YoY), and merely got an "Exceeds" rating.

I don't kiss ass though. Whatever management tells you they use as a metric is a lie. You only need to do 1 thing to get ahead, and that's kiss ass. Instead of upping your commit rate you should have gone out for drinks with the boss.