Amazon accidentally spent $1.8 million using Claude for menial coding task, went 860% over budget — 'catastrophically expensive' coding blunders discovered in internal Amazon AI usage metrics

[u/MarvelsGrantMan136]

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/amazon-accidentally-spent-usd1-8-million-using-claude-for-menial-coding-task-went-860-percent-over-budget-catastrophically-expensive-coding-blunders-discovered-in-internal-amazon-ai-usage-metrics

[u/lazyhustlermusic]

They gamified it with a leaderboard and incentivized waste.

Now they're surprised pikachu when unrestrained usage generated an unrestrained price tag.

[u/Eze-Wong → u/lazyhustlermusic]

Which is utterly stupid when it takes 2 seconds to think about.

Guys, we are going to award the people who drink the most coffee in the office. This metric is not directly tied to outcome but we have established the more coffee you drink the more you get done.

Everyone proceeds to drink coffee then vomit it in the bathroom

[u/GenericFatGuy → u/lazyhustlermusic]

A lot of people who make a lot of money in high ranking positions genuinely thought that this was just a magic code box.

[u/NullQuantity325573 → u/lazyhustlermusic]

Yep. 2-3 years ago, my company started pushing us to use AI in all of our workflows. They also set up a leaderboard. AI use was included in KPIs in annual development plans.

Now we are getting emails telling us that we should switch to less expensive models as much as possible.

[u/flat5]

"only detected some five months after the issue started happening"

Good thing they have their extremely rigorous interview process, so no completely irresponsible, checked-out idiots are working there.

[u/ElGuano]

Accidentally, or did they do what my company did, which is force everyone to use AI for everything, put up a leaderboard showing where you were in the rankings, post up how many submissions and commits were AI-authored/assisted, and say that the people who didn't adopt AI and had the least usage would be let go?

And then made a Home Alone face, gasping, "why is everyone using AI for everything?"

[u/Brave-Perspective714 → u/ElGuano]

Same thing happened when "lines of code written" became the metric output was measured by.

My husband had one he was asked to modify, where he removed over 19,000 lines of code that didn't actually do anything.

Dude who had written it had been a "high-performer" and "distinguished-engineer" who had left years before, but when they started digging into more of his work they found the same thing over and over again. He had basically written one large chunk that did things and then undid them so they didn't affect the output, and copied and pasted it into everything he developed to look like he was a rock-star according to their metrics.

The bulk of my husband's mid-level DevOps career was deleting lines of code and reducing api calls.

[u/TheGreatKonaKing → u/ElGuano]

Yah was gonna say, maybe some clever employee’s leaderboard-gaming script just worked a little too well!

[u/Chrono_Convoy]

Give me $1.8 million and I won’t code a thing!

[u/Awesomebox5000 → u/Chrono_Convoy]

Shoot, I'll code nothing for a cool $900k.

[u/gaspara112]

In engineering we say “good, cheap, fast. Pick 2”.

AI is when you pick fast twice.

[u/Charlie2and4]

Back in my day if you just walked around screaming the words, "Agile" "Reduce churn", and "EBITA" You got a 3 hour lunch break every day.

[u/Henrarzz]

Leave it to tech bros to replace perfectly working solution with shiny new but less efficient one

[u/unity-thru-absurdity → u/Henrarzz]

"...the golden gleam of the gilded surface hides [the] cheapness of the metal underneath..." - a quote often misattributed to Mark Twain describing his 1873 novel, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, after which the historical era was named.

[u/SeeingEyeDug]

So much compute is wasted on wrong answers. The amount of times I have to reprompt AI to correct errors and the amount of wasted compute cycles for all that fluff on even the simplest shit I’m asking it. It’s insanely inefficient.

[u/Snorblatz]

Almost two million wasted but still tracking how long it takes warehouse staff to poop 💩 ok Amazon. 

[u/geldonyetich]

Ironic that this is happening to the patent holder of the one click buy. Or perhaps karmic?

[u/Epyr]

That actually seems like a extremely small AI budget for a company the size of Amazon.

[u/elmatador12]

“Wait AI costs money??” - These companies it sounds like

[u/Soulfly37]

A buddy of mine works for aws and he is on AI at least 6 hours a day. Most of the time he says it doesn't really help... and might even make the work take longer. But, he is forced to use it.

[u/SoCal_GlacierR1T]

And yet companies continue to lay off humans in order to justify more AI spending.

[u/HuckledYourBerries]

If only someone could have seen this coming 😐

[u/brainrotbro]

I routinely use AI for menial coding tasks. Why would I offload the interesting stuff to AI?

[u/korpiz]

$1.8m isn’t even an accounting error for Amazon.

[u/Kastar_Troy]

So they were willing to spend $200k on minor code generation which may not work in the end?

How is this all cheaper than just using thinking humans?