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

arstechnica.com

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

#231

Post by rossdavidh »

lokar wrote: post #27

If this is true, it misunderstands the primary goals of code review. Code review should not be (primarily) about catching serious errors. If there are always a lot of errors, you can’t catch most of them with review. If there are few it’s not the best use of time. The goal is to ensure the team is in sync on design, standards, etc. To train and educate Jr engineers, to spread understanding of the system. To bring mor…

As Deming once said in regard to manufacturing inspections: "Inspection does not improve the quality, nor guarantee quality. Inspection is too late. The quality, good or bad, is already in the product."

The fact that software is "soft" makes it seem like this doesn't apply, but it does, not least because of the fact that once you have gone down the wrong path with software design, it is very difficult to pull back and realize you need to go down an entirely different one.

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

#232

Post by dboreham »

tren_hard wrote: post #195
bonesss wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Can't fix stupid"

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

#233

Post by djb_hackernews »

davidclark wrote: post #21
cobolcomesback wrote: post #11

This “mandatory meeting” is just the usual weekly company-wide meeting where recent operational issues are discussed. There was a big operational issue last week, so of course this week will have more attendance and discussion. This meeting happens literally every week, and has for years. Feels like the media is making a mountain out of a mole hill here.

The article claims: >He asked staff to attend the meeting, which is normally optional. Is that false? It also discusses a new policy: >Junior and mid-level engineers will now require more senior engineers to sign off any AI-assisted changes, Treadwell added. Is that inaccurate? It is good context that this is a regularly scheduled meeting. But, regularly scheduled meetings can have newsworthy things happen at them.

When an SVP asks you to do something in a mass email, it's very much optional. Dave Treadwell is an SVP, his org is likely in the 10's of thousands, there is no way to even have a mandatory meeting for that many people.

My SVP asks me to do things all the time, indirectly. I do probably 5% of them.

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

#234

Post by dboreham »

MDGeist wrote: post #45

A former colleague of mine recently took a role that has largely turned out to be "greybeard that reviews the AI slop of the junior engineers". In theory it sounds workable, but the volume of slop makes thoughtful review impossible. Seems like most orgs will just put pressure on the slop generators to do more and put pressure on the approvers and then scape goat the slop approvers if necessary?

This was always the case in the before times with humans. AI just pulls back the curtain on the delusion that code can and is being meaningful reviewed.

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

#235

Post by asadotzler »

radiator wrote: post #162
sdevonoes wrote: post #57

Reviewing AI generated code at PR time is a bottleneck. It cancels most of the benefits senior leadership thinks AI offers (delivery speed). There’s also this implicit imbalance engineers typically don’t like: it takes me 10 min to submit a complete feature thanks to Claude… but for the human reviewing my PR in a manual way it will take them 10-20 times that. Edit: at the end real engineers know that what takes effor…

> Senior leadership doesn’t know this, though. Well, you'd think senior leadership should know how their business and their people work.

LOL

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

#236

Post by dude250711 »

malfist wrote: post #157
prakhar897 wrote: post #128

From the amazon I know, people only care about a. not getting fired and b. promotions. For devs, the matrix looks like this: 1. Shipping: deliver tickets or be pipped. 2. Having Less comments on their PRs: for some drastically dumb reason, having a PR thoroughly reviewed is a sign of bad quality. L7 and above use this metric to Pip folks. 3. Docs: write docs, get them reviewed to show you're high level. Without AI, a…

Not only is having too many comments on your PRs bad for you, but so is not leaving comments on other people's PRs. Both are metrics used

I'd leave lots of comments out of spite whenever I would feel my PRs had been treated unfairly. If I am going down, you all are coming with me.

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

#237

Post by hrmtst93837 »

AlexeyBrin wrote: post #4

I wonder how this will work in practice. Say I'm a senior engineer and I produce myself thousands of lines of code per day with the help of LLMs as mandated by the company. I still need to presumably read and test the code that I push to production. When will I have time to read and evaluate similar amounts of code produced by a junior or a mid level engineer ?

[flagged]

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

#239

Post by dude250711 »

sethops1 wrote: post #18

> The response for now? Junior and mid-level engineers can no longer push AI-assisted code without a senior signing off. So basically, kill the productivity of senior engineers, kill the ability for junior engineers to learn anything, and ensure those senior engineers hate their jobs. Bold move, we'll see how that goes.

But Amazon is something you tolerate for a year or two early in the career, before moving somewhere better (which is anywhere else)?

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

#240

Post by javcasas »

djb_hackernews wrote: post #233
davidclark wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article claims: >He asked staff to attend the meeting, which is normally optional. Is that false? It also discusses a new policy: >Junior and mid-level engineers will now require more senior engineers to sign off any AI-assisted changes, Treadwell added. Is that inaccurate? It is good context that this is a regularly scheduled meeting. But, regularly scheduled meetings can have newsworthy things happen at them.

When an SVP asks you to do something in a mass email, it's very much optional. Dave Treadwell is an SVP, his org is likely in the 10's of thousands, there is no way to even have a mandatory meeting for that many people. My SVP asks me to do things all the time, indirectly. I do probably 5% of them.

With tens of thousands in a meeting, cracking a 30-second stupid joke is probably costing several thousand dollars.
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