Amazon engineering leadership circulated guidance discouraging excessive reliance on AI tooling and token-based metrics in software development
Policy change Provisional 72% confidence first seen
Amazon issued internal guidance urging engineers to avoid “tokenmaxxing” and to use AI tools more selectively, arguing that token usage and related AI metrics are unreliable for measuring team performance. The guidance emphasizes exercising judgment, documenting where AI does not help, and focusing on outcomes such as ROI-style measures like feature velocity.