Amazon Workers 'Tokenmaxxing' — Making Up Tasks to Hit AI Usage Quotas — 376 Points, 422 Comments on HN

Fast Company / Hacker News·high signal

Amazon instituted targets for 80%+ of developers to use AI weekly and tracks token consumption on internal leaderboards. Employees told the Financial Times they're using internal tool 'MeshClaw' to automate unnecessary tasks, inflating usage scores with real actions in production systems — code deployments that didn't need to happen, emails that didn't need sending. Analysts describe it as a textbook Goodhart's Law failure: the measure became the target, producing fake productivity data and real operational noise.