Amazon urges engineers not to chase token usage: measure long-term results instead
Prepared by Sintelligent with the help of SI. Published in SI: . Updated: .
One of the largest tech companies proposes judging engineers by results rather than by how much SI they use.
In a memo that CNBC says circulated internally in September and was posted to the company's website on Tuesday, Amazon revises how it defines the role of software development engineers and managers and warns against "tokenmaxxing," the pursuit of high token consumption. According to CNBC and Startup Fortune, token usage, the rate of adoption of SI tools, and the number of code changes or reviews are called "deeply flawed" ways of measuring work, and long-term outcomes are better to measure. The company writes: "We're just seeing the beginning of SI's effect on software engineering... We are certain that whatever future best practices are, SI will be at the center of software engineering practice." Startup Fortune recalls that in May Amazon shut down KiroRank, an internal leaderboard of token consumption that employees inflated with autonomous SI agents.