> 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
Just for context, this pattern (different teams using different tools in different ways) is extremely normal within Amazon, and is intentional. These shouldn't necessarily be seen as a failure. Amazon likes to have multiple competing options they use for everything, and they constantly evaluate which option is best performing, like an A/B test. After a couple years they will pare away whatever performs worst, replacing it with a new option. This strategy definitely has it's disadvantages, but it is an intentional chosen pattern throughout the company.
Source: I worked there for 5 years, and painfully/tearfully remember the transitions chime -> slack -> teams and workdocs -> quip -> confluence :')
Some dipshit with too much power and not enough brain cells nor incentive to care about making good choices. That's also an intentionally chosen pattern throughout the company. :)
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.
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.
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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?!
> 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.
For the code I generate and the limited way I am using it, Claude Sonnet is reliable and good.
I hope that I can someday run something very much like it locally.
The moment that happens, the AI industry is essentially useless to me. I don't need some ultra expensive "Totally better" model that does the exact same thing.
assuming it hasnt changed, agent spaces is just a developer desktop running on actual aws rather than on internal hosts, and they figured out how to put vscode on it in a security approved way, including your employee credentials.
one of the things that allows is for adding mcps, skills, and various harnesses that are preconfigured to work out of the box.
i doubt its gotten out of the employee needing to sign in every couple hours
It's the worst harness i ever used. And they are selling it like crazy to all their enterprise customers who don't know any better. A true money printer at this point.
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.
When the cost for this leverage is more than an employee the math stops mathing.
Additionally, for tech work. There is a tension about doing work and not knowing that output is correct or not. I have seen ai spit out thousands of lines of opencv code for a simple color lut. The person doing this had no idea what was going on. If they continued, the token cost and time waiting for agents spinning only goes up.
Yes, agents get smarter and cheaper but the above example replays over and over again even on crud apps. You still need to dev the skills and transfer costs for it to be effective.
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
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
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.
It’s the same as posting paywalls articles. There’s no need to make a new rule. If the users can’t read it, the conversation will simply devolve into title commenting.
- Can confirm that channel exists and it's great. Rofl every day for all the stupidity happening in the company.
- Despite many seeing Amazon as outsider for AI, it's actually a great place to work (if not fired). We have free access to all frontier models, including today's Mythos release for all employees.
- Every model available on Bedrock is available for free with no caps. I think it's because these models are deployed on trainium chips which is essentially free for Amazon.
- Claude code and Codex are available unlimited for employees.
- For this one I will be bitten, but I actually like Kiro CLI. It's powered by the same Anthropic/OpenAI models. It's a bit easier to understand for me than CC and surprisingly does a better job at writing research papers.
- Amazon Quick, alternative to Claude Cowork, also has some nice features like in-browser presence so you don't have to copy/paste content from the web.
- I personally haven't seen a push to use AI at all costs. Yes, there are many internal tools being developed (e.g. meshclaw) but no one tracks their adoption for redundancy purposes. I think leaders are pretty consistent with what they communicate externally (e.g. hiring of juns).
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.
It’s all relative. Kiro is second to Claude Code, but Amazon isn’t really competing with Anthropic. They need something better than Microsoft/Github Copilot and that is a low, low bar.
Enterprise GTM for these behemoths relies on offering everything a customer needs so they don’t shop around. It’s Microsoft’s playbook and AWS copies it for the same market. That’s why they each offer a “good enough” (but objectively garbage) solution for everything under the sun.
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.
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 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.
> 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 mean, FB/Meta have been using lots of GPUs and compute for well over a decade at this point, they definitely are one of the few companies who can make use of relatively absurd amounts of these to drive revenue (i.e. improve ranking for both personal/organic and paid posts).
Whether or not they'll get a return from this wave is much more up in the air.
What kills me more about them is they could easily build a coding model, purely focused on coding, and it could probably be competitive, instead they're wasting away at anime avatars or whatever Mark Zuckerberg needs for his metaverse utopia.
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.
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'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.
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.
> I know there are good product people inside Amazon
For UI though? I mainly use the shopping site, AWS, and Prime Video, but none of those are productivity-style apps, which need to have less basic workflows to be competitive. Can you name any successful Amazon apps along those lines?
This is true. Amazon Seller Central, AWS Partner Central, and Glue Databrew are all Amazon productivity-style apps, and I hated every minute of using them. Quicksight is okay these days, but it took them a decade to get there. They really struggle outside of devtools and consumer-facing web experiences.
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.
images/screenshots could have watermarks, recreations don't. Sources = not the people who created memes, sources here just mean people who sent the screenshots to the journalist.
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.)
On one hand, they don't want to piss off all their employees with big brother culture.
To some extent, it's less offensive to mock your own stuff the bigger you are. In my limited big corp experience, everything was so big and convoluted it was never anyone's fault (150 teams worked on <thing>) something sucked and there were always 25 more teams working to fix it anyway. In some ways, it was actually helpful because people would stay engaged trying to improve things "on a big scale"
Suppressing systematic issues makes it easy to carve out a niche pretending to look useful while doing nothing (which is ultimately a waste of money)--big corp already have plenty of those
It's a fool's errand to try to prevent criticism to that extent. It's mostly harmless and functions as a release valve for people's frustrations and helps to stop them from doing something more extreme than just complaining.
It's also possibly illegal to stop them. Employees in the US have a legal right to talk to each other about their working conditions and employers are not allowed to stop them. Most companies aren't above violating that law, but they want to save that for actual union-busting, not to stop people from sharing memes.
Even before the internet, employees were making these kinds of criticisms at lunch, at the water cooler and during their car pools.
If the company forbids it on visible internal channels, it will just pop up on external, private channels. With less corporate control and less corporate visibility and more leaks.
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.
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.
The non-programmers at amazon I know are all just getting onto kiro. I guess there’s two versions of kiro(?) one aimed at devs and the other more web/mcp friendly. Ic and managers are still just wading into the waters and still haven’t learned that token dashboards are snake eating its own tail endgame for these groups.
From the outside it looks like a hot mess of many competing teams trying to become the chosen one for all of Amazon’s ai use. As a result it’s a confusing mess of tools that don’t last very long and creates tons of churn and confused employees who learn new tools as they're killed.
Definitely enjoying watching the chaos unfold from a distance at these trillion dollar businesses
Oof hit a nerve with the jeffbots on this but it doesn’t change the fact that everyone is laughing when you know the layoffs are predictably coming in with each earnings call.
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.