Amazon has rolled out an internal AI coding agent called MeshClaw, set AI-usage targets for eighty percent of its developers, and put up a leaderboard in the office showing who's burned the most tokens. The Financial Times broke it this week. Management has assured the engineers that token statistics will not be used for performance reviews. The engineers do not believe them, and have started using the bot purely to inflate their numbers. The bot, meanwhile, is wired up to deploy code.

The panel has seen this before. Not the bot — the leaderboard. Lotus Notes in '96, SharePoint in '04, Yammer in '12, Teams in '20, Copilot in '24. Different acronym, same printout outside the cafeteria. What's different this time isn't the AI. The AI is incidental. What's different is the scale of the bet relative to the certainty of the payoff, and the fact  ...