'Sloppenheimer:' Amazon Employees Mock the Company's AI on Slack

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.

"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

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.

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.

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

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

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.)

> 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.

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

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

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

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.

Another one of these 404 Media bait posts, okay, we got it, there's internal staff memes.

Related:

Google employees internally share memes about how its AI sucks

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48400311

[flagged]

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.

Maybe those people need to part ways with the company and let professionals replace them instead