Amazon employees are “tokenmaxxing” due to pressure to use AI tools

Amazon employees are gaming internal AI usage metrics by using the company's internal 'MeshClaw' agentic tool to automate unnecessary tasks and inflate token consumption. This behavior stems from pressure after Amazon set targets requiring over 80% of developers to use AI weekly and began tracking token usage on internal leaderboards. Despite Amazon's claim that token stats won't affect performance reviews, employees believe managers are monitoring the data, creating perverse incentives around AI adoption metrics.