Amazon Tokenmaxxing
Rafe Rosner-Uddin (Hacker News):
The Seattle-based group has started to widely deploy its in-house “MeshClaw” product in recent weeks, allowing employees to create AI agents that can connect to workplace software and carry out tasks on a user’s behalf, according to three people familiar with the matter.
Some employees said colleagues were using the software to automate additional, unnecessary AI activity to increase their consumption of tokens—units of data processed by models.
They said the move reflected pressure to adopt the technology after Amazon introduced targets for more than 80 percent of developers to use AI each week, and earlier this year began tracking AI token consumption on internal leader boards.
[…]
Amazon has told employees that the AI token statistics would not be used in performance evaluations. But several staff members said they believed managers were monitoring the data.
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
Previously:
Update (2026-05-15): See also: Jon Snader and Hacker News.
Update (2026-05-29): Dare Obasanjo:
Amazon comes to its senses and realizes tokenmaxxing is dumb. The company has shut down an internal leaderboard that tracked employees’ use of AI tools after workers tried to boost their scores with unnecessary activity that increased the company’s computing costs.
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“Silicon Valley” was ahead of its time with its AI gags, but I think even they didn’t see this one coming. Or maybe they did but thought it was too far-fetched to be an episode.
It's 2026 and managers in the big corp of the world still don't know the cobra effect aka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive.
