Amazon sends chills through its workforce with mixed message memo about AI use

There's a ridiculously simple test you can use to figure out whether AI mandates at a given company are well-considered, or are being shoved out the door by out-of-touch buffoons: What happens when an engineer documents that AI made a task worse? Are they taken seriously, or are they marginalized and eventually managed out?

Conveniently, this week Amazon published a treatise by Terk Terkowitz, a VP/Distinguished Engineer/Final Boss of Their Independent Contributor Technical Career Track, on the role of the developer in the age of AI. It was originally an internal missive sent to their software engineers and their managers back in September, which is an interesting lag for a document that sounds this confident. It also maps exceedingly well to what other organizations are struggling with.

I think it's a good document, but I can't help but view it with a somewhat cynical eye. I see it as an attempt to make the future of the profession of software engineering feel less bleak. And it's feeling mighty bleak for a lot of folks right now.

What's the context?

This treatise comes at a time of dramatic upheaval. Tech as an industry is no stranger to change (usually at 3AM, heralded by the pager), but something about the current AI-ification of the world strikes many of us as fundamentally dissimilar from previous revolutions. Folks are scared about their career prospects. "Should I give up tech and get into farming?" is a sincere question multiple people have asked me. I don't know! Tech is already a goat rodeo, so you've got a leg up if you do?

This anxiety isn't theoretical. In May, Amazon wisely shut down KiroRank, an employee-built cash incineration leaderboard that ranked people by token usage, after the obvious thing happened: people spun up junk tasks to climb the ranks. This is now called "tokenmaxxing," and the Terkowitz treatise specifically calls it out as being at odds with "frugality." Meta did the same thing with "Claudenomics" and 85K employees that same week. And Amazon reportedly announced another 250 job cuts this week. I can't tell you that these things are related. But I can tell you that every engineer who read the memo assumes that they are.

What's the thing say?

This document contains a lot of great stuff. I have a tremendous level of respect, both personal and professional, for Amazon's Principal Engineering community; I'm led to understand that that respect may not be reciprocated, but that's okay. I am, by their standards, a lapsed engineer who ran away to join the circus as one of its lesser clowns.

Terkowitz's memo emphasizes customer outcomes and engineering judgement, two things I would absolutely not delegate to AI any time soon. (Note: I am writing this in October of 2026, with the full understanding that previous comments on the capabilities where AI falls short tend to age like fine milk.) It documents work that (today) AI tools aren't improving. That's way better than assuming that every objection to AI inherently comes from some self-interested Luddite who's scared of being replaced. It also says something smart about measurement: look at the 90th percentile of AI adoption, at those teams burning the most tokens, and check whether their delivery actually went up commensurately. This is great! Shout it from the rooftops; we should all be doing such things.

But still, I wonder.

The memo says If your work does not benefit from current AI tooling, that is a finding, not a failing." Document it, bring it to your manager, work through the problem. I agree with every word of that! The question is whether anyone's promo doc is gonna survive citing it.

Here's what happens next. The memo concedes that input metrics are "deeply flawed," but then in the next paragraph says to go ahead and use them anyway, carefully. It then warns that non-adopters are falling behind. Those are three different positions within three sentences and they're not at all aligned with one another.

That's not muddled; I think it's cover. A manager can cite "a finding, not a failing" when a strong engineer skips the AI tool, and then cite "falling behind" when it's time to PIP someone. Both are congruent with their stated policy; you get to decide which interpretation you want to go with in a given situation.

How will managers handle justified AI non-use? Are promotion and performance decisions being made in a way that rewards these long term outcomes? Or are they instead taking the easy weasel way out, optimizing for what's cheap to measure, and rewarding tool activity? Because if you give me a metric, I will turn it into a target. So will an overwhelming majority of employees. When that happens, everyone loses - it's how KiroRank happened in the first place.

Everyone's selling tokens - including Amazon

I write this after two days of attending GitHub Universe, where they talked about how agents start roughly 40% of PRs now. And yet, Jay Parikh's keynote argument was that useful output wasn't "more code," but rather completed outcomes: features shipped, bugs fixed, security issues addressed, loudmouth columnists silenced, etc. The problem here is that their entire business model cuts against that; they're billing in a model that charges customers on a consumption basis, not an output basis. There's nothing, today, that ties "AI spend" to "output that was worth the effort."

Which brings us back to Amazon. The memo says tokenmaxxing is at odds with frugality, and for Amazon's internal cost line, it is. Meanwhile AWS bills Bedrock and Kiro customers by the token. Inside the building, tokenmaxxing is a problem to be stamped out. Outside it, it's the revenue plan. (R)