'Sloppenheimer:' Amazon employees mock the company's AI on Slack
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Here is what I learned:
- AWS had an in-house LLM tool that was terrible they tried to use for a while
- A lot of them still use Kiro
- Claude Code is currently the de-facto standard
- They're in the process of getting some custom Codex variant that doesn't phone-home and is audited approved
- There's no mandated organizational standard for what exact tools to some, various teams have different levels of adoption and stacks
- No org-wide/team-wide conventions for Claude Code
- They do have token budgets
- There's an intenral push for something called "Agent Spaces" which was described to me as a sort of Lovable/Bolt-type thing if I understood it right
I can't validate all of this and I might have misremembered, but just in case anyone else finds it interesting.
Even if it did let me fill out TPS reports 20% faster, who even cares compared to all of this chaos?
so, just like a manager manages employees, or you consult a contractor, agents are a way of getting leverage over a system.
that said, if you want to learn to play saxophone, you're free to do so. just note your personal endeavors may begin to look more like hobbies than marketable skills.
Additionally, for tech work. There is a tension about doing work and not knowing that output is correct or not. I have seen ai spit out thousands of lines of opencv code for a simple color lut. The person doing this had no idea what was going on. If they continued, the token cost and time waiting for agents spinning only goes up.
Yes, agents get smarter and cheaper but the above example replays over and over again even on crud apps. You still need to dev the skills and transfer costs for it to be effective.
I have hit my 6.25x limit exactly once in the last quarter.
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I realize that we will all eventually be forced to pay more for this and I have raised it as a real possibility to the org for budgeting scenario planning; however, for now, why would you pay by token when it's subsidized?!
e: I now understand; you can stop downvoting.
Anthropic (and maybe OpenAI?) have gated all the important enterprise features behind API plus pricing in the last quarter or two.
I hope that I can someday run something very much like it locally.
The moment that happens, the AI industry is essentially useless to me. I don't need some ultra expensive "Totally better" model that does the exact same thing.
one of the things that allows is for adding mcps, skills, and various harnesses that are preconfigured to work out of the box.
i doubt its gotten out of the employee needing to sign in every couple hours
> No org-wide/team-wide conventions for Claude Code
Just for context, this pattern (different teams using different tools in different ways) is extremely normal within Amazon, and is intentional. These shouldn't necessarily be seen as a failure. Amazon likes to have multiple competing options they use for everything, and they constantly evaluate which option is best performing, like an A/B test. After a couple years they will pare away whatever performs worst, replacing it with a new option. This strategy definitely has it's disadvantages, but it is an intentional chosen pattern throughout the company.
Source: I worked there for 5 years, and painfully/tearfully remember the transitions chime -> slack -> teams and workdocs -> quip -> confluence :')
I've only ever seen it in Microsoft shops that used it from the beginning.
I have not heard of any nor run into any token budgets.
There is generally a lot of team-wide usage of CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md, team-specific skills, oncall skills, etc.
Not as much org-wide, although my org has an MCP server built for helping with oncall.
Everyone and their mother making vibe-app platforms for their company API's now
- there are no token budgets
There should be a rule about this kind of posts. If there isn't already.
articles restricting most users from reading them seems too limiting
ban all sites with paywalls/login walls including Twitter, NYT, FT, Business Insider, literally all of them
I've gone ahead and moved this week's meeting, which happens to be tonight, to your place.
We'll be there soon.
(If I remember right, some video links dont always work with xcancel.)
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> Complaints about paywalls are off topic, so please don't post them.
- Can confirm that channel exists and it's great. Rofl every day for all the stupidity happening in the company.
- Despite many seeing Amazon as outsider for AI, it's actually a great place to work (if not fired). We have free access to all frontier models, including today's Mythos release for all employees.
- Every model available on Bedrock is available for free with no caps. I think it's because these models are deployed on trainium chips which is essentially free for Amazon.
- Claude code and Codex are available unlimited for employees.
- For this one I will be bitten, but I actually like Kiro CLI. It's powered by the same Anthropic/OpenAI models. It's a bit easier to understand for me than CC and surprisingly does a better job at writing research papers.
- Amazon Quick, alternative to Claude Cowork, also has some nice features like in-browser presence so you don't have to copy/paste content from the web.
- I personally haven't seen a push to use AI at all costs. Yes, there are many internal tools being developed (e.g. meshclaw) but no one tracks their adoption for redundancy purposes. I think leaders are pretty consistent with what they communicate externally (e.g. hiring of juns).
Memes were top shelf; absolutely masterclass
Amazon should just focus on being a utility compute provider. Anything they try to do on top of that is just consistently second rate.
Why?
What's wrong with using Claude Code/Codex?
https://cloud.google.com/customers/qualia
Then there's Mark Z who is throwing away piles of money, but nothing to show for it other than letting people easily hack his social media sites? I really hope they never let an AI just send someone a link like that again? If you're at the point where a person is taking over an account, have a human review it, check for red flags like a VPN.
I mean, FB/Meta have been using lots of GPUs and compute for well over a decade at this point, they definitely are one of the few companies who can make use of relatively absurd amounts of these to drive revenue (i.e. improve ranking for both personal/organic and paid posts).
Whether or not they'll get a return from this wave is much more up in the air.
For UI though? I mainly use the shopping site, AWS, and Prime Video, but none of those are productivity-style apps, which need to have less basic workflows to be competitive. Can you name any successful Amazon apps along those lines?
All the "we built it so we could say we have it in sales meetings" stuff is pretty bad
300 IQ move. Nobody will be able to trace it back to sources now.
(Not saying it shouldn't be allowed, just that it's surprising based on how controlling I'd expect a big corp like Amazon to be.)
It's also possibly illegal to stop them. Employees in the US have a legal right to talk to each other about their working conditions and employers are not allowed to stop them. Most companies aren't above violating that law, but they want to save that for actual union-busting, not to stop people from sharing memes.
To some extent, it's less offensive to mock your own stuff the bigger you are. In my limited big corp experience, everything was so big and convoluted it was never anyone's fault (150 teams worked on <thing>) something sucked and there were always 25 more teams working to fix it anyway. In some ways, it was actually helpful because people would stay engaged trying to improve things "on a big scale"
Suppressing systematic issues makes it easy to carve out a niche pretending to look useful while doing nothing (which is ultimately a waste of money)--big corp already have plenty of those
If the company forbids it on visible internal channels, it will just pop up on external, private channels. With less corporate control and less corporate visibility and more leaks.
Related:
Google employees internally share memes about how its AI sucks
why would hackers be interested in this
From the outside it looks like a hot mess of many competing teams trying to become the chosen one for all of Amazon’s ai use. As a result it’s a confusing mess of tools that don’t last very long and creates tons of churn and confused employees who learn new tools as they're killed.
Definitely enjoying watching the chaos unfold from a distance at these trillion dollar businesses