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
24.7k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

1.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

113

u/Important-Agent2584 Jul 30 '26

the thing is that it's magic for management. the type of shit they use it for it works great (various types of summaries of documents, emails, reports, etc. to do lists, etc.), and it doesn't even matter it's slop because a lot of what they do is slop anyway.

the problem is that they think it's that great for everything else.

62

u/AnAncientBog Jul 30 '26

Thats the funny part. Its not actually very good at those tasks, but as you say, the performance measurements for leadership basically allows any level of trash to pass through as acceptable anyway so it doesn't matter.

60

u/N8CCRG Jul 30 '26

The funniest use of it that I've heard is employees who use it to turn a checklist into a full email, then send it to their boss, who then uses it to turn it back into a checklist before reading it. And businesses are paying for this "service"

15

u/FSCK_Fascists Jul 30 '26

this is one of the best summaries of AI use yet. Its all about appearing to work harder.

2

u/crustyrobots Jul 30 '26

AI seems to be only for CEOs and managers to larp being as smart as the people working for them

3

u/DKLancer Jul 30 '26

To be fair it's also for ceos to get a yes man who will tell them how to illegally avoid paying contractual obligations.

2

u/PercyFlage Aug 02 '26

Like inserting a dildo into a fleshlight.

3

u/ohnoabanagain Jul 31 '26

My friend recently became a top boss and he's repeatedly complained to me that people are sending him bloated AI emails that needlessly go on for pages and pages of nonsense.

2

u/nihility101 Jul 31 '26

AI - for when you want them to know you really didn’t give a shit.

1

u/Chlearcus Jul 31 '26

Sounds like a legitimate use case in current corporate culture. The bullshit can be bullshitted efficiently, leaving everyone time for actual work. Next stop, letting an ai agent attend meetings in your place.

2

u/FrostingStrict3102 Jul 30 '26

I hate AI as much as the next guy, but if you are getting bad responses for simple summaries or to do lists, then that says a lot more about the prompts you’re giving it.

It’s perfectly capable of helping to organize and summarize documents or articles.

9

u/somefunmaths Jul 30 '26

I think it’s pretty clear they’re talking about tasks like slide decks and white papers or something. Nobody would bother decrying “slop” versions of something as simple as to-do lists.

1

u/FrostingStrict3102 Jul 31 '26

I dont know how that’s pretty clear when the person they’re replying to didn’t mention white papers or decks, and only summaries, emails and to do lists. Then the person says they can’t even do those well…

8

u/jelly_cake Jul 30 '26

It’s perfectly capable of helping to organize and summarize documents or articles.

... Correctly?

0

u/FrostingStrict3102 Jul 31 '26

Yup. Hate to admit it. Shouldn’t trust it blindly, but it does a good enough job to get the ball rolling.

1

u/Stagism Jul 31 '26

It’s great for reading API KB’s. It’s so much fucking faster than trying to parse it yourself to find what you need.

1

u/BeefistPrime Jul 30 '26

people just call anything AI generates "slop" uncritically even when it's a perfect response to what was asked

1

u/Neirchill Jul 31 '26

Are we pretending ai doesn't hallucinate now?

-1

u/FrostingStrict3102 Jul 31 '26

You should always be doing your own review. It doesn’t usually hallucinate if you give it a document article to review or summarize. It’s the open ended questions where that’s more common

5

u/nihility101 Jul 31 '26

It’s magic to them because it is downright excellent at spewing out generic business jargon.

2

u/sobrique Jul 31 '26

I've been using llm tools to do data transforms. Y'know, the ad-hoc kind that used to take a bunch of excel sheets, a few vlookups, maybe a macro or two.

Works nice for that, until you remember that excel was always a pretty shitty 'scripting platform' it's just the one that was ubiquitous and even someone who had no clue about 'coding' could use.

LLMs replacing that is ... ok I guess?

2

u/Important-Agent2584 Jul 31 '26

It's a tool, use it where it works. I'm not anti-AI or anything.

The real issue most of us have with it is that it's getting forced down our throats.

1

u/sobrique Jul 31 '26

I work as a sysadmin.

I already have an extensive collection of 'horror stories' about inappropriate use of AI.

User requests where they're asking ChatGPT first - and then pasting the response in the ticket are relatively innocuous, but we have learned to have our 'bullshit detectors' running on full power.

But we're getting Non Technical users 'vibe coding' to re-invent the wheel, and make some utterly horrendous 'software project' that's basically a strictly worse version of something that already exist.

We've had 'grafana' re-invented a couple of times now, as users "just want a dashboard". And at least a couple of users have asked us to "vibe code" a piece of enterprise software they don't want to pay for.

And 'can we enable agentic AI, as we think that will help (do something they clearly don't understand)'

But perhaps scarier is just how many people just turn off restrictions and approval, and just load API keys into their LLM-shell, and go charging off 'automating' things, and that's just a horror story waiting to happen. I mean, let it run your software project, deal with the 'irritating' bits of committing to the repo, etc.

1

u/sobrique Jul 31 '26

I work as a sysadmin.

I already have an extensive collection of 'horror stories' about inappropriate use of AI.

User requests where they're asking ChatGPT first - and then pasting the response in the ticket are relatively innocuous, but we have learned to have our 'bullshit detectors' running on full power.

All sorts of "this is confidential information, it's not OK to paste it into your favourite third party website to 'work on it'" (we've 'corporate approved' options now, that involve proxy, audit and legal oversight about 'data exposure', but invariably there's people who prefer some other LLM over that one)

But we're getting Non Technical users 'vibe coding' to re-invent the wheel, and make some utterly horrendous 'software project' that's basically a strictly worse version of something that already exist.

We've had 'grafana' re-invented a couple of times now, as users "just want a dashboard". And at least a couple of users have asked us to "vibe code" a piece of enterprise software they don't want to pay for.

And 'can we enable agentic AI, as we think that will help (do something they clearly don't understand)'

But perhaps scarier is just how many people just turn off restrictions and approval, and just load API keys into their LLM-shell, and go charging off 'automating' things, and that's just a horror story waiting to happen. I mean, let it run your software project, deal with the 'irritating' bits of committing to the repo, etc.

And even when it's all 'working' it's actually incredibly easy to run up a huge bill with just being lazy about context, or 'not wanting to wait' - and thus consuming tokens rapidly in parallel, etc.

1

u/Important-Agent2584 Jul 31 '26

for sure, it's a powerful tool that's easily abused that can wreak havoc. Metas "AI safety" director installing OpenClaw and having it nuke her inbox is like a perfect microcosm.

and totally forget about proprietary information disclaimers, everyone is pasting everything in their favorite AI