'Sloppenheimer:' Amazon Employees Mock the Company's AI on Slack

I recently wound up in conversation with someone working at Amazon. Inevitably, the convo steered into AI/LLM's at some point.

Here is what I learned:

- AWS had an in-house LLM tool that was terrible they tried to use for a while

- A lot of them still use Kiro

- Claude Code is currently the de-facto standard

- They're in the process of getting some custom Codex variant that doesn't phone-home and is audited approved

- There's no mandated organizational standard for what exact tools to some, various teams have different levels of adoption and stacks

- No org-wide/team-wide conventions for Claude Code

- They do have token budgets

- There's an intenral push for something called "Agent Spaces" which was described to me as a sort of Lovable/Bolt-type thing if I understood it right

I can't validate all of this and I might have misremembered, but just in case anyone else finds it interesting.

"Sign up for free access to this post".

There should be a rule about this kind of posts. If there isn't already.

https://archive.ph/1YRCE

Amazon’s attempts at AI tooling are just far too behind to be taken seriously. Kiro, Quick whatever, the Alexa updates. All just a hot mess. Amazon’s own employees appear to have abandoned Kiro en mass when allowed to just use Claude.

Amazon should just focus on being a utility compute provider. Anything they try to do on top of that is just consistently second rate.

I'm surprised with Amazon and Meta in terms of AI. Less surprised with Google, I think Google has a very specific niche they picked. If you really think about it, you don't have to be the absolute best, you just have to keep refining your model for efficiency and cost, and I think that's Google's true goals and secret sauce. Google will snowball into place. They're also used more than most people realize.

https://cloud.google.com/customers/qualia

Then there's Mark Z who is throwing away piles of money, but nothing to show for it other than letting people easily hack his social media sites? I really hope they never let an AI just send someone a link like that again? If you're at the point where a person is taking over an account, have a human review it, check for red flags like a VPN.

> I've recreated all the memes rather than share screenshots from the Slack channel in order to protect sources.

300 IQ move. Nobody will be able to trace it back to sources now.

I've never worked in a big corporate environment, so I'm always surprised that these companies allow employees to mock their own products/managers/bosses.

(Not saying it shouldn't be allowed, just that it's surprising based on how controlling I'd expect a big corp like Amazon to be.)

Maybe those people need to part ways with the company and let professionals replace them instead

Any text forums these days has the grokenspiels played by sloppenheimers. It feels like a literature cross between Punk'd and Crank Yankers but stars clanker wankers rather than TV and movie celebrities.

Archive link? I'm not making an account to look at their memes, come on

Hardly newsworthy, everything is mocked on the internal slack lol.

Sidebar: I love how Amazon basically gave up on AWS Chime for Slack. Even dogfooding their own messaging product didn't work.

Another one of these 404 Media bait posts, okay, we got it, there's internal staff memes.

Google employees internally share memes about how its AI sucks

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48400311

You cant deliver and have quality engineering teams, while you spent the last 15 years treating your employees under a frugal way, and being the biggest H1B IT employer in the US.

Amazon should just focus on being a utility compute provider. Anything they try to do on top of that is just consistently second rate.

> I've recreated all the memes rather than share screenshots from the Slack channel in order to protect sources.

300 IQ move. Nobody will be able to trace it back to sources now.

I recently wound up in conversation with someone working at Amazon. Inevitably, the convo steered into AI/LLM's at some point.

Here is what I learned:

- AWS had an in-house LLM tool that was terrible they tried to use for a while

- A lot of them still use Kiro

- Claude Code is currently the de-facto standard

- They're in the process of getting some custom Codex variant that doesn't phone-home and is audited approved

- There's no mandated organizational standard for what exact tools to some, various teams have different levels of adoption and stacks

- No org-wide/team-wide conventions for Claude Code

- They do have token budgets

- There's an intenral push for something called "Agent Spaces" which was described to me as a sort of Lovable/Bolt-type thing if I understood it right

I can't validate all of this and I might have misremembered, but just in case anyone else finds it interesting.

I am more curious about how much token budget they have. Here I have to beg my boss for more as if he is paying from his pocket or I am using it for my hobby projects (I am not). I guess time to go back to copy/pasting to chat and doing things by hand like a caveman.

From the outside it always seems laughably circuitious compared to just learning skills ourselves.

Even if it did let me fill out TPS reports 20% faster, who even cares compared to all of this chaos?

"Sign up for free access to this post".

There should be a rule about this kind of posts. If there isn't already.

https://archive.ph/1YRCE

> If there isn't already.

There is![0]

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989

By that logic links to the FT and the WaPo also couldn't be posted. Which I guess is a fair position to take, but seems too limiting to me.

Someone should point their LLM at creating a web plugin that just overlays a comment section & wiki style editing for archive and other similar websites. Then we can do the same thing LLMs are doing to invalidate primary sources.

https://cloud.google.com/customers/qualia

I think Amazon is doing ok as the cloud where most customers run their LLM. I think a lot of companies are using e.g., Anthropic models on Bedrock so it lives inside their AWS cloud.

I've never worked in a big corporate environment, so I'm always surprised that these companies allow employees to mock their own products/managers/bosses.

(Not saying it shouldn't be allowed, just that it's surprising based on how controlling I'd expect a big corp like Amazon to be.)

As an individual contributor I sell my time, not my soul.

Maybe those people need to part ways with the company and let professionals replace them instead

If you've been 20 years in and built the infrastructure you might disagree with new management and have a very clear view on the harm new policies are making. Professionals might be the ones that have skin in the game.

Archive link? I'm not making an account to look at their memes, come on

Sidebar: I love how Amazon basically gave up on AWS Chime for Slack. Even dogfooding their own messaging product didn't work.

IDK how the Chime team managed to make such a garbage product. Like, somehow they managed to make something even worse than Teams with a UI that made Webex look modern. I know there are good product people inside Amazon, so IDK what combination of incentives resulted in Chime.

When AWS had meetings with us we’d insist on setting up the call ourselves to avoid using the steaming pile of garbage that was Chime. AWS folks confided that they didn’t mind and weren’t thrilled about being forced to use dogfooded stuff that literally seemingly no customers wanted to buy.

Another one of these 404 Media bait posts, okay, we got it, there's internal staff memes.

Google employees internally share memes about how its AI sucks

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48400311

You cant deliver and have quality engineering teams, while you spent the last 15 years treating your employees under a frugal way, and being the biggest H1B IT employer in the US.

I think Amazon is doing ok as the cloud where most customers run their LLM. I think a lot of companies are using e.g., Anthropic models on Bedrock so it lives inside their AWS cloud.

As an individual contributor I sell my time, not my soul.

I'm trying to think of a single Amazon-made product I've used that has a good UI/UX. I guess their main shopping website gets the job done (I would argue their messy product categorization would harm my UX rating of them) but their iOS app is one of the ugliest thing I have installed on my phone.

Genuinely, it was one of the worst parts of working at Amazon. Especially since I often interacted with people who only used Chime. Messages would be missed for weeks because they'd never check slack, or I'd never check chime. Awful experience.

Amazon acquired it. Initially, it was a messenger app (not) used in India.

Whatever the reasons, all Amazon UIs are always pretty awful

Hardly newsworthy, everything is mocked on the internal slack lol.

Make it anonymous. Now that would be newsworthy.

I don't understand this token budget shit. Why would anyone, in their right mind, not be using Claude Max? All of the engineers at our org are using 6.25x and several heavy non-developers are as well. The rest of the company with licenses are using 1.25x.

I have hit my 6.25x limit exactly once in the last quarter.

---

I realize that we will all eventually be forced to pay more for this and I have raised it as a real possibility to the org for budgeting scenario planning; however, for now, why would you pay by token when it's subsidized?!

From the outside it always seems laughably circuitious compared to just learning skills ourselves.

Even if it did let me fill out TPS reports 20% faster, who even cares compared to all of this chaos?

the problem is scale. there's a tension between an individual developing technical skills (transfer cost is high, slow, expensive) and developing agent skills (transfer cost is low, instant, free).

so, just like a manager manages employees, or you consult a contractor, agents are a way of getting leverage over a system.

that said, if you want to learn to play saxophone, you're free to do so. just note your personal endeavors may begin to look more like hobbies than marketable skills.

Shareholders want the company to figure out how to pay fewer employees, and pay them less by down-skilling them

> If there isn't already.

There is![0]

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989

Importantly, in that rule:

> Complaints about paywalls are off topic, so please don't post them.

By that logic links to the FT and the WaPo also couldn't be posted. Which I guess is a fair position to take, but seems too limiting to me.

What meaningful conversation can you have about an article you can read beyond the headline?

> seems too limiting to me.

articles restricting most users from reading them seems too limiting

ban all sites with paywalls/login walls including Twitter, NYT, FT, Business Insider, literally all of them

the problem is scale. there's a tension between an individual developing technical skills (transfer cost is high, slow, expensive) and developing agent skills (transfer cost is low, instant, free).

so, just like a manager manages employees, or you consult a contractor, agents are a way of getting leverage over a system.

that said, if you want to learn to play saxophone, you're free to do so. just note your personal endeavors may begin to look more like hobbies than marketable skills.

Shareholders want the company to figure out how to pay fewer employees, and pay them less by down-skilling them

Importantly, in that rule:

> Complaints about paywalls are off topic, so please don't post them.

Amazon acquired it. Initially, it was a messenger app (not) used in India.

Whatever the reasons, all Amazon UIs are always pretty awful

Amazon's toxic culture finally caught up to them. Early on they nailed it with Retail and AWS. Since then, all that terrible cutthroat culture grinded the efficacy down into producing just abomination after abomination of any business besides, just throwing bodies at AWS.

Make it anonymous. Now that would be newsworthy.

Anonymous is the hero we need here for sure

I have hit my 6.25x limit exactly once in the last quarter.

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In order to get enterprise agreement you need to pay per token for Claude.

> I realize that we will all eventually be forced to pay more for this and I have raised it as a real possibility to the org for budgeting scenario planning; however, for now, why would you pay by token when it's subsidized?!

Anthropic (and maybe OpenAI?) have gated all the important enterprise features behind API plus pricing in the last quarter or two.

because they’re not; anthropic is pushing enterprises to switch to API/token pricing

What meaningful conversation can you have about an article you can read beyond the headline?

Just because you don't have access doesn't mean that people with access should be disallowed from discussing it. It just means you can't really discuss the article, but that's never stopped anyone from commenting before

Sadly, knowing most people, headline is rarely read past even when it isnt paywalled

> seems too limiting to me.

articles restricting most users from reading them seems too limiting

ban all sites with paywalls/login walls including Twitter, NYT, FT, Business Insider, literally all of them

For anyone who doesnt know: changing the x.com or twitter.com in a twitter link to xcancel.com usually works to view tweets without an account.

(If I remember right, some video links dont always work with xcancel.)

Seems pretty easy to have a bot automatically try to create an archive link and comment it.

WSJ and Bloomberg offer "gift links" that paid users can share. The latter is only good for 7 days IIRC, however.

Ok, anyone care to gather at a coffee shop so that we can discuss the print version?

There are plenty of posts every day that don’t require you to get through a paywall - I personally just ignore them. I imagine there are only a handful of paywalled articles a week, and most of them end up having an archive link in the comments anyway