{"id":19274,"date":"2026-10-29T00:48:56","date_gmt":"2026-10-29T00:48:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/?p=19274"},"modified":"2026-10-29T00:48:56","modified_gmt":"2026-10-29T00:48:56","slug":"amazon-warns-against-tokenmaxxing-and-tells-engineers-to-use-their-judgment-when-using-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/?p=19274","title":{"rendered":"Amazon warns against tokenmaxxing and tells engineers to use their judgment when using AI"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Companies have pushed their employees to use AI to be more productive, but some have started questioning whether embracing it for every task is a good idea. Amazon is the latest to urge employees to use AI, but to use it judiciously.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The e-commerce giant published a memo on Tuesday revising its guidelines for software engineers, saying Amazon has entered \u201cthe era of the Renaissance Developer\u201d who blends AI and their own expertise and judgment \u201cto build entirely new things.\u201d This includes telling management when AI isn\u2019t useful to their work and explaining why.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIf your work does not benefit from current AI tooling, that is a finding, not a failing,\u201d Terk Terkowitz, vice president and distinguished engineer at WorldWide Amazon Stores, wrote in the memo. \u201cDocument why, share it with your community of peers, bring it to your manager, and work to find solutions. An engineer who can explain where AI does not yet help their work is demonstrating the judgement we are asking for.\u201d<\/p>\n

The idea is that indiscriminate AI use could end up working against the company. Terkowitz wrote that counting tokens and measuring lines of code are \u201cdeeply flawed\u201d ways to gauge productivity because they don\u2019t necessarily reflect the quality of work. He wrote that turning those metrics into \u201ctargets\u201d could drive up costs\u2014\u201dtokenmaxxing is at odds with frugality\u201d\u2014and add unnecessary complexity, which undermines Amazon\u2019s principle of \u201cinvent and simplify.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThey are disconnected from what matters,\u201d he wrote.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Amazon has already grappled with the pitfalls of encouraging AI use for its own sake. Employees were reportedly running AI agents on meaningless tasks to inflate their token count and climb an unofficial internal AI leaderboard called Kirorank. Amazon nixed it in May after the practice raised concerns about unnecessary computing costs, which can add up quickly. An unnamed company accidentally spent $500 million on Claude in one month after failing to put limits on employees\u2019 usage, Axios reported.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

The e-commerce giant isn\u2019t alone in specifying AI best practices. Shopify\u2019s CEO Toby L\u00fctke, who previously told employees in a memo that embracing AI is \u201ca baseline expectation,\u201d said last month that some workers are producing \u201cslop grenades\u201d\u2014AI-generated emails and code that create more work for their colleagues to review afterward.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Still, Amazon is far from discouraging AI use, and even far from abandoning its AI adoption metrics altogether, since Terkowitz wrote they still \u201ccorrelate well with the outputs that matter.\u201d Terkowitz encouraged managers to compare the 10th percentile and 90th percentile of AI users on their teams\u2014for those using it the least, to understand why, and for those using it the most, to determine whether their output is increasing accordingly.<\/p>\n

\u201cUsing these input metrics, with care and judgement, as you think about your career and your organization\u2019s performance is appropriate,\u201d he wrote. \u201cWorking together, over time, we will find better metrics and set smarter goals.\u201d<\/p>\n

#Amazon #warns #tokenmaxxing #tells #engineers #judgment<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Companies have pushed their employees to use AI to be more productive, but some have…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[245],"tags":[291,6638,1390,9357,2312,11851,372],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19274"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19274"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19274\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19274"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19274"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19274"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}