Amazon tells engineers not to treat AI like a snack

The story

Amazon warns engineers against 'tokenmaxxing'—using AI excessively to inflate metrics—while still encouraging AI use, citing concerns about productivity and cost.

Source: fortune.com

Our reading

Amazon’s engineers are now being told not to treat AI like a snack they can just keep eating until they feel full. The company wants them to use it like a knife—precise, purposeful, and not just for the thrill of cutting things.

But if you’re an engineer and you’re not using AI, you’re not failing, you’re just being honest. Which is weird, because honesty is usually the first thing you lose when you start using AI to do your thinking for you.

So the next time you see a line of code that seems suspiciously clean, remember: it might not be genius, it might just be a machine that didn’t need to be turned on.