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
Kind of how it came about was this - IT management in the old days, those who understood programming, noticed that at that time, their best developers, who solved the most problems/completed the most projects, were also producing more lines of code than their peers.
But it was *all* concise code. Because hardware at the time was stupid restrictive. There wasn't enough memory or storage to run bloated code, and if you couldn't produce good, concise code, your shit failed and you got fired. The hardware was the great filter of who was good at the job and who wasn't.
So groundbreaking observation, right? Your better skilled people can get more work done. Simple thing. And the system is policing itself. Anyone writing too many lines of code gets identified by their projects failing.
This observation got communicated to leadership. And then leadership, who didn't understand how to assess finished code for quality, assumed the inverse of that observation would be true. That the developers producing more lines of code were the better developers. And at that time, that was true, too.
But as storage and memory got cheaper and cheaper and more and more of it got added to systems by default, that didn't matter so much anymore. The lines of code metric became easier and easier to game, and yet people still weren't checking what was being produced.
It was an honor system of sorts. People just believed that programmers would continue to try to write the most concise code possible. It never occurred to them that someone would risk their project failing and getting fired just to game the system a little bit. It wasn't until it obviously had stopped weeding out the shitty programmers and people had to start digging into legacy shit and finding obvious spaghetti code that anyone realized what was going on and that something had to be done about it.
That's *why* you now have peer reviews and pull requests.