AMAZON'S ANTI-TOKENMAXXING MEMO SAYS ENGINEERS SHOULD BE PICKIER ABOUT USING AI

Summary from the TLDR newsletter

Amazon has released a memo to staff saying that token usage and code generation should be considered with care and judgment. The company has not instituted caps on employees' token usage, but it has acknowledged that metrics like token usage, the rate of adoption of AI tools, and code changes or reviews remain deeply flawed ways of measuring AI usage, and that they can lead to higher costs and too much complexity. The company is now looking at how many launches it is doing and how many successful changes it is making in production to measure how AI is improving engineer productivity.