Not just Amazon, too. It feels like all of big tech (and some smaller firms) have simultaneously gone insane. Imagine if your CEO woke up one day and told the company: "We need to encourage travel spending. Please book as many business trips as you can, and spend as much money as possible. Fly first class to our satellite offices! Take limos instead of Ubers! Eat at fine restaurants! Make sure you are constantly traveling. In fact, we are going to make Travel Spending part of your annual performance review: If you don't spend enough on business travel, you'll get a low rating!"

We are living in a totally bonkers time.

This is what inspired me to build my new CLI tool, Burn, Baby, Burn (https://github.com/dtnewman/burn-baby-burn/tree/main).

(If you are a VP at Amazon, yes, I'll consider acquisition offers. I'm also working on an enterprise version of this with additional features.)

Show HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48151287

I know some that was told to try and use AI more on the job so they created some agent to just burn tokens and ended up using about 10x what the next highest employee used. Buddy expected to get shit but instead got an accolade and was asked to give a short talk to the other employees about how they could match their success.

At my company we were told AI spend was part of perf review and that the "singularity" had happened. Now 20% of our infrastructure spend is tokens. The average number of pull requests per dev per week increased with all this spend. From 4.2 to 5.1. And that includes a huge chunk of PRs that are just agents changing a line or two in a config. It's all magical thinking

> It feels like all of big tech (and some smaller firms) have simultaneously gone insane.

Some companies might just have been scammed by the marketing that told them that AI would make all their employees 10,000x more productive and save them billions and when that didn't happen the assumption was that it's because employees weren't using the magical AI as often as they should be.

Other companies, especially those working on their own AI products, might want employees to use AI as much as possible because they hope it will provide them with the training data they'll need to eventually replace most or all of those employees with the AI. Punishing workers who refuse to train their AI replacement might make sense to them because even though it's costly right now they expect the savings down the road to be much much greater.

My dad worked at a company that had their own travel agency (early 90s when you needed a travel agent for reasons that no longer apply), and he was often booked on the more expensive flight because the travel agency made more money. More than once he could have got first class for less on a different flight but company policy didn't allow him to fly first class.

We have always been living in bonkers time.

Exactly this.

And the fact that it is an industry-wide meme at this point makes bright red flashing lights and klaxons go off on my mind that a catastrophic reckoning can't be too far. There's not enough money in the world to keep this up for too long.

Look it might seem silly, but the point is to get all our employees to be travel-pilled. They just don't know how great travel is yet.

I think a lot of these execs have equity in Anthropic... and the dumb ones that don't are just "keeping up with the Joneses" so to speak.

Bragging about token usage is like bragging about LoC written.

This would be hilarious if a bunch of companies did not already do exactly this with exec travel. And academics do this all the time when travel has to be funded from grants.

One reason it works out like that for travel funding is that it’s often the ‘use it or lose it’ kind of funding. If you do not use all of the funds allotted, you can’t ask for more and could realistically get less.

It seems like a natural result. People have been trying to use dashboards / metrics to roll up / indicate how well teams and individuals have been doing for a long time. Therefore, "part 1" was already in place. Now, something even easier to track is available (token usage). So, just throw token usage on the dashboard and tell people that higher is better - what other outcome would you possibly expect?

Even as a very happy NVDA shareholder I agree with you. It's comical that managers are being so naïve as to think that you can crap out a dashboard of "tokens consumed per week" and get any useful signal at all from it, beyond learning who's not using AI.

Incompetent use of a coding agent, or just general shenanigans, can burn tokens all day but it's not going to get tickets done.

Just looking at the work output - how many story points, tickets, how many new bugs are opened, etc. has not become any less relevant a metric for productivity with AI. If you're a skilled and proper user of AI those numbers would be changing in the right direction, compared to before you had it.

It's more like "We really value face-to-face interaction, so we're going to track that with your total travel spend. We don't want to get in the way, so there's no budget."

Good time to be a sane company then. "Never interrupt your opponent while he is in the middle of making a mistake." and all.

I kind of get what they're thinking in trying to make sure all engineers use AI. For myself, and for the engineers working with me, I saw everyone go through an initial aversion and resistance to AI, and then an instant productivity boost when we started using them. So there's definitely a good reason to get everybody to start using AI. You don't want a good engineer resisting AI indefinitely if you know it will make them more productive.

Incentivizing people who are already using AI to use as many tokens as possible does seem a little crazy, though.

Management has confided in me that token usage is a secret performance metric. At the same time I'm getting emails from infrastructure people about prompting techniques to get LLMs to speak more concisely to save the company money lmao. I'd prefer a video essay mode that bulks everything up.

Two years ago everyone would have told you that 'impact' was the way to measure people, and been aghast at tracking inputs like hours. Say what you will, but at least showing up at 8 didn't cost the company money. Today I see people spending time and money vibe coding tools in search of a problem, just to spend tokens and demonstrate that they're on board with the singularity.

> Imagine if your CEO woke up one day and told the company: "We need to encourage travel spending. Please book as many business trips as you can, and spend as much money as possible.

I had a manager like this once. He didn't last very long, but it was without a doubt the most fun six months of my career.

You mean like using lines of code as a metric to rank engineers [1]?

Managers love metrics. Bad managers particularly love metrics. Tokens used was almost the obvious bad metric that was going to be used.

I would argue that tokens used has actually exposed a useful metric: any manager who focused on this, demanded this or ranked based on this should be fired, for being a bad manager.

[1]: https://evan-soohoo.medium.com/did-elon-musk-really-fire-peo...

It’s preposterous, companies are blindly funding slop and the product is fool’s gold.

because it's come to CFO's as "free debt" aka fiat printing. They need to spend thisfree fiat to keep buble going. I'm sure some inv. banking team internally assured too. $Trillion instuitions have access to free printer now, you and I don't. This is different world since unlimited printer started in 2020. All debt math is fake now because they can create fiat money out of nothing, literally.

You'd be surprised...

I worked for an international (mothership in the UK, later acquired by the US) company, which had... sort of a similar policy.

So, the (mothership) company acquired a lot of satellite companies, all in banking business. All over the world. Then they figured their CEO was corrupt, got in problems with the law, got kicked out. While they were waiting for the new "real" CEO to step in, they let some "interim" CEO to take his place.

New new (interim) CEO didn't seem to have a clue about the business she was supposed to run, nor did she care. She knew her time was running out, and she figured she'd spend it traveling the world and partaking in fine dining in every corner of the world the company's tentacle could reach. But, to make it seem more plausible, she, sort of, created a policy of "experience exchange", which sent random troupes of select individuals from different branches of the company to "exchange experience" with another similarly randomly assembled troupe. Of course, the company picked the bill when it comes to lodging and dining.

Our inconsequential branch in Israel saw a pilgrimage of high-ranking banking managers from all over the world, but, mostly the wealthier parts of it. Some didn't even bother to show up in the office though, and proceeded straight to the banquet hall of the most expensive hotel on the Tel Aviv beach.

To be fair though, the interim CEO got the boot even before her time was supposed to end, but it was serendipitously close to the acquisition by the US company, and so she was let go as part of a "restructuring" and "optimization"... but it was a crazy year!

I'm making sure to use the most expensive model possible for the stupidest shit constantly. They asked for it!

I've definitely been in situations where managers tell me to "spend X amount before the end of the year." They don't want higher ups to think they can cut our budget.

It's like if class-based society materialized within the IT. And the manager class collectively pushes the narrative of AI replacing ICs.

Note that it has beaten capitalism, making rational choices to increase earnings has lost to this AI dream.

I wonder where in business school they teach you to "measure inputs and try to maximize them", because that's basically what's happening.

Nonsense. It’s a little bit of a loss leader so devs are hooked on it and it’s considered incredibly unproductive to work without one. Then they will just have 10 peoples jobs replaced with one guy.

People think we’re living in oh so capitalist times, why then does everything smell soviet.

IMO, the investors behind AI play the Uber game: they subsidise the AI costs and inject it into all facets of society they can get their hands on. They can tell the execs to increase AI usage at any cost. Their bet is that we'll become AI addicts with athrophied brains before they run out of money.

Also, don't forget that their datacenters will burn our electricity and boil our rivers at rates much cheaper than what we are billed in our homes. So while you're happy generating mountains of AI slop, somewhere there is a datacenter boiling a river.

I'd compare this to a new patented formula of water that's nobody asked for, and the patent owners are trying to replace all water supply with their crap before we wake up.

If we suddenly went from rail travel to jets that's exactly what would happen. We'd go from 0 to all the business flights that happen today. Everyone would be under enormous pressure to not be a laggard.