'Sloppenheimer:' Amazon employees mock the company's AI on Slack

Posted by doener 9 hours ago

Comments

Comment by gavinray 9 hours ago

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.

Comment by pinkmuffinere 7 hours ago

> 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 :')

Comment by nateglims 2 hours ago

You've missed out on migrating to Zoom, Asana, and Sharepoint now.

Comment by antonvs 6 hours ago

How does anyone intentionally decide to migrate to Teams?!

I've only ever seen it in Microsoft shops that used it from the beginning.

Comment by xingped 4 hours ago

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. :)

Comment by sparrc 7 hours ago

I work at AWS, we got access to Claude Code very recently, most people are using Kiro and that seems to be the defacto standard.

I have not heard of any nor run into any token budgets.

There is generally a lot of team-wide usage of CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md, team-specific skills, oncall skills, etc.

Not as much org-wide, although my org has an MCP server built for helping with oncall.

Comment by soma8088 4 hours ago

- claude is relatively new, was only whitelisted about 1-2 months ago. kiro is still de-facto, a lot of ai tools use its acp as a back-end.

- there are no token budgets

Comment by noisy_boy 8 hours ago

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.

Comment by garciasn 8 hours ago

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?!

e: I now understand; you can stop downvoting.

Comment by mrgaro 8 hours ago

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

Comment by garciasn 8 hours ago

Ah; I didn't realize there was a 150 person cap to Team and I suppose paying out the ear is worth it for compliance audit. Makes sense in that regard.

Comment by disgruntledphd2 8 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by 8 hours ago

Comment by dastbe 8 hours ago

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

Comment by mrguyorama 8 hours ago

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.

Comment by 8note 7 hours ago

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

Comment by tyingq 8 hours ago

Would be really curious what the internal market share for Kiro is. Not a really good look for it if it's just smattering use here and there.

Comment by siva7 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by nh23423fefe 4 hours ago

i like it a lot. why dont you?

Comment by Ancalagon 7 hours ago

> 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

Everyone and their mother making vibe-app platforms for their company API's now

Comment by add-sub-mul-div 9 hours ago

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?

Comment by dfee 8 hours ago

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.

Comment by rustystump 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by wahnfrieden 8 hours ago

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

Comment by stanac 9 hours ago

"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

Comment by sarreph 9 hours ago

> If there isn't already.

There is![0]

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

Comment by mirashii 8 hours ago

Importantly, in that rule:

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

Comment by MisterTea 4 hours ago

Which is ironic because if you cant read the article, how can you have a discussion?

Comment by cheshire_cat 9 hours ago

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.

Comment by dminik 8 hours ago

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

Comment by dylan604 8 hours ago

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

Comment by rustystump 8 hours ago

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

Comment by functionmouse 8 hours ago

> 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

Comment by nosioptar 8 hours ago

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.)

Comment by airstrike 8 hours ago

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

Comment by 8 hours ago

Comment by imglorp 8 hours ago

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

Comment by Forgeties79 8 hours ago

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

Comment by incanus77 8 hours ago

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

Comment by ssl-3 8 hours ago

You guys haven't been going to the meetings?

Comment by apparent 7 hours ago

No, my horse broke down so I've been stuck at the farm.

Comment by ssl-3 4 hours ago

No worries, comrade.

I've gone ahead and moved this week's meeting, which happens to be tonight, to your place.

We'll be there soon.

Comment by davidwritesbugs 6 hours ago

You have a /horse/?! Well laadeedaa

Comment by apparent 5 hours ago

It is funny how things that were completely ordinary 100 years ago are now considered luxury items. I suppose it's because they're used for leisure instead of as work horses/transportation, and because feeding/housing/mucking is now a burden for city/suburban dwellers.

Comment by incanus77 1 hour ago

The more time goes by, the more wondrous the recollection of my grandfather (1909-2006) telling me about growing up living across the street from a livery stable (i.e. horse commuter parking). Men would come into town to work at the steel mill and leave their horse for the day. He would say that after about 1922, cars were much more common, which in retrospect given the relative cost makes me think more that they crowded out horses, rather than the common mill worker upgraded from a horse to a car.

Comment by gessha 4 hours ago

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.

Comment by cyanydeez 9 hours ago

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.

Comment by isengard3000 5 hours ago

Amazon employee here.

- 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).

Comment by nunez 2 hours ago

Reminds me of Memegen from Google, the one thing I miss about working there.

Memes were top shelf; absolutely masterclass

Comment by giancarlostoro 8 hours ago

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.

Comment by ako 8 hours ago

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.

Comment by disgruntledphd2 8 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by giancarlostoro 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by cmiles8 8 hours ago

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.

Comment by mrbonner 5 hours ago

Then how do they get promoted?

Comment by computomatic 8 hours ago

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.

Comment by fg137 6 hours ago

> They need something better than Microsoft/Github Copilot

Why?

What's wrong with using Claude Code/Codex?

Comment by computomatic 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by antonvs 6 hours ago

Because they have a multi-trillion dollar market cap that they need to justify and maintain.

Comment by yesitcan 8 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by 05 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by Apocryphon 7 hours ago

Perhaps Kiro has yet to master reading text in images.

Comment by nozzlegear 8 hours ago

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.)

Comment by nijave 5 hours ago

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

Comment by TheCoelacanth 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by bobim 8 hours ago

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

Comment by compiler-guy 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by 7 hours ago

Comment by 9 hours ago

Comment by kotaKat 9 hours ago

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

Comment by Centigonal 8 hours ago

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.

Comment by KyleTheDev 8 hours ago

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.

Comment by dieselgate 7 hours ago

Dang, that's a pretty classic dynamic. It even happens between just using a single chat app and email

Comment by nijave 6 hours ago

Imo a lot of AWS products are garbage. Their key competency is making technical products for technical users from scratch given concrete requirements

All the "we built it so we could say we have it in sales meetings" stuff is pretty bad

Comment by hbn 8 hours ago

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.

Comment by reducesuffering 8 hours ago

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.

Comment by cyberax 8 hours ago

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

Comment by gedy 8 hours ago

Whatever the reasons, all Amazon UIs are always pretty awful

Comment by antonvs 6 hours ago

> 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?

Comment by watermelon0 6 hours ago

Unless something has changed recently, Slack uses AWS Chime SDK for audio/video, so at least the core technology is great.

Comment by 9 hours ago

Comment by pRusya 6 hours ago

The Chime team is still busy. They released a new version just two weeks ago!

Comment by cmiles8 8 hours ago

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.

Comment by bilsbie 7 hours ago

Are they don’t anything useful with AI? I would have figured it could help their operations.

Comment by Insanity 9 hours ago

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

Comment by dlev_pika 8 hours ago

Make it anonymous. Now that would be newsworthy.

Comment by Nuzzerino 8 hours ago

Anonymous is the hero we need here for sure

Comment by Perz1val 9 hours ago

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

Comment by lucrbvi 8 hours ago

http://archive.today/1YRCE

Comment by tcp_handshaker 9 hours ago

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.

Comment by ChrisArchitect 8 hours ago

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

Comment by nh23423fefe 4 hours ago

agree. im already beginning to see this domain as indicator of trash quality post

why would hackers be interested in this

Comment by bebeidjdkrjrjr 8 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by zuzululu 8 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by bobim 8 hours ago

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.

Comment by zuzululu 7 hours ago

You don't actually have skin in the game as part of the cost center. Again, the thing to do if you are not happy with the decision making or management is to leave and let another mature professional replace you instead of adding to the complaining and degrading morale of the overall company.

A professional recognizes the above and someone just there to pay the bills isn't.

Comment by supjeff 7 hours ago

maybe the managers should be replaced

Comment by economistbob 8 hours ago

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.

Comment by burger_moon 7 hours ago

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

Comment by burger_moon 5 hours ago

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.