Amazon tells engineers to stop 'tokenmaxxing' to look productive

I worked for a company where management and peers rewarded "looking busy" vs. actual productivity. Lord help you if someone caught you sitting at your desk silently contemplating deep Architectural decisions. I hated that job.

I get the concept of tokenmaxxing, but instill don’t get how you do that. Do people just do random work unrelated things with their company subscriptions? Or are they just intentionally inefficient at their work? And how would you go about telling an LLM to waste tokens?

They wouldn't need to tell engineers this if tokens were not being used as a measure of productivity.

Do as we say, not as we do.

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Amazon realized that true productivity comes from RTO.

Amazon should stop ranking employees on the metric "number of tokens burnt"

Just like "lines of code" should never be a KPI.

Wait until management learns that code itself also is geberally a liability and requires maintenance, is a source of bugs, etc. That's basically why measuring lines of code has been frowned upon for a long time as a measure of developer productivity.