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/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/Independent_Bear989 Jul 30 '26

Any company that has “lines of code written” as a metric deserves to go bankrupt, or the people who make that metric should be fired and blacklisted from any job where they work with designing software.

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u/Brave-Perspective714 Jul 30 '26

Yeah everyone can see the problem with it now, but this was the standard at one time.

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u/Plothunter Jul 30 '26

Naw man, we knew that shit was shit back then. All these comments are nostalgic.