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After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes

arstechnica.com

191–200 of 510 posts

Re: After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No I’m keeping up with the system as a whole because I’m always working at a system level when I’m using AI instead of worrying about the “how”

No you’re not. The “how” is your job to understand, and if you don’t you’ll end up like the devs in the article. We as an industry have been able to offload a lot of “how” via deterministic systems built by humans with expert understanding. LLMs give you the illusion of this.

No in my case the “how” is

1. I spoke to sales to find out about the customer

2. I read every line of the contract (SOW)

3. I did the initial requirements gathering over a couple of days with the client - or maybe up to 3 weeks

3. I designed every single bit of AWS architecture and code

4. I did the design review with the client

5. I led the customer acceptance testing

> We as an industry have been able to offload a lot of “how” via deterministic systems built by humans with expert understanding. LLMs

I assure you the mid level developers or god forbid foreign contractors were not “experts” with 30 years of coding experience and at the time 8 years of pre LLM AWS experience. It’s been well over a decade - ironically before LLMs - that my responsibility was only for code I wrote with my own two hands

Re: After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats easy enough to prevent with modular code that’s what “plan mode” is for. But you probably never worked with a bunch of C# developers using R#

1. Preventing agents from crossing boundaries, creating implicit and explicit dependencies, and building false layers requires much more human control over every PR and involvement with the code than you seem to espouse. 2. Assuming that techniques that work with human developers that have severely impaired judgement but are massively faster at producing code is a bad idea. 3. There’s no way you have enough experienc…

Absolutely no one in the value chain cares about “how many layers of abstractions your code has - not your management or your customers. They care about functional and none functional requirements

Re: After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes

#193

>Junior and mid-level engineers can no longer push AI-assisted code without a senior signing off Review by a senior is one of the biggest "silver bullet" illusions managers suffer from. For a person (senior or otherwise) to examine code or configuration with the granularity required to verify that it even approximates the result of their own level of experience, even only in terms of security/stability/correctness, r…

Senior review can definitely help, regardless if the code comes from a junior or an LLM. We've done this since the dawn of time. However, it doesn't scale and since LLM volume far exceeds what juniors can do, you end up overwhelming the seniors, who are normally overbooked anyway.

The other problem is that the type of errors LLMs make are different than juniors. There are huge sections of genuinely good code. So the senior gets "review fatigue" because so much looks good they just start rubber stamping.

I use an automated pipeline to generate code (including terraform, risking infrastructure nukes), and I am the senior reviewer. But I have gates that do a whole range of checks, both deterministic and stochastic, before it ever gets to me. Easy things are pushed back to the LLM for it to autofix. I only see things where my eyes can actually make a difference.

Amazon's instinct is right (add a gate), but the implementation is wrong (make it human). Automated checks first, humans for what's left.

Re: After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not my experience — I'm significantly faster while guiding an LLM using this methodology. The gains are especially notable when working in unfamiliar domains. I can glance over code and know "if this compiles and the tests succeed, it will work", even if I didn't have the knowledge to write it myself.

> I'm significantly faster while guiding an LLM using this methodology. https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o... >When developers are allowed to use AI tools, they take 19% longer to complete issues—a significant slowdown that goes against developer beliefs and expert forecasts. This gap between perception and reality is striking: developers expected AI to speed them up by 24%, and even after e…

Fair point. I have definitely caught myself taking longer to revise a prompt repeatedly after the AI gets things wrong several times than it would have taken to write the code myself.

I'd like to think that I have this under control because the methodology of working in small increments helps me to recognize when I've gotten stuck in an eddy, but I'll have to watch out for it.

I still maintain that the LLM is saving me time overall. Besides helping in unfamiliar domains, it's also faster than me at leaf-node tasks like writing unit tests.

Re: After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes

#195
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mine's tracking it complete with a leaderboard (LOL) and it's been suggested to me that it'd be in my best interest not to be too low on that list, so I suspect in the back half of the year some sterner conversations and/or pink-slips are going to be coming the way of those who've not caught on that they need to at least be sending some make-work crap to their LLMs every day, even if they immediately throw the output…

From a management perspective I would be highly skeptics of token leaderboards. You are incentivizing people to piss away company money with uncertain rewards. I mean… throw some docs into the context window, see it explode. Repeat that a few times with some multi-step workflows. Presto, hundreds of dollars in “AI” spending accomplishing nothing. In olden days we’d just burn the cash in a waste paper basket.

My company doesn’t enforce AI usage but for those who choose to use it, every month they highlight the biggest users. It’s always non-tech people who absolutely don’t understand how LLMs work and just run a single chat for as long as possible before our system cuts them off and forces them into a new chat context.

Re: After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not my experience — I'm significantly faster while guiding an LLM using this methodology. The gains are especially notable when working in unfamiliar domains. I can glance over code and know "if this compiles and the tests succeed, it will work", even if I didn't have the knowledge to write it myself.

> I'm significantly faster while guiding an LLM using this methodology. https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o... >When developers are allowed to use AI tools, they take 19% longer to complete issues—a significant slowdown that goes against developer beliefs and expert forecasts. This gap between perception and reality is striking: developers expected AI to speed them up by 24%, and even after e…

How long will that 19% hold as models grow in capability?

Re: After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes

#197
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A related Dirty Secret that's going to become clear from all this is that a very large proportion of code in the wild (yes, even in 2026—maybe not in FAANG and friends, IDK, but across all code that is written for pay in the entire economy) has limited or no automated test coverage, and is often being written with only a limited recorded spec that's usually fleshed out only to the degree needed (very partial) as a gi…

> better-specified software Code is the most precise specification we have for interfacing with computers.

There are some cases where AI is generating binary machine code, albeit small amounts. What do we have when we don't have the code?

Re: After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes

#198
post #154

Maybe its my 1 buddy that works at amazon, but they seemed extremely slow to adopt LLMs. Big ships take a long time to turn, but this seemed hostile. I am seeing this mindset still, with AI Agents. I imagine they will slowly realize they need to use this stuff to be competitive, but being slow to adopt AI seems like it could have been the source of this.

LLMs have been garbage for real work until very recently. Doesn't this show they were adopted too soon at amazon?

Disagree, I've been using it for at least a year to write functions.

Re: After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes

#199
post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm significantly faster while guiding an LLM using this methodology. https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o... >When developers are allowed to use AI tools, they take 19% longer to complete issues—a significant slowdown that goes against developer beliefs and expert forecasts. This gap between perception and reality is striking: developers expected AI to speed them up by 24%, and even after e…

How long will that 19% hold as models grow in capability?

I'm a bit tired of waiting for "tomorrow", so I'll just live in today's world. We'll burn that bridge when we get to it.
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