A year later, they will require AI to sign off engineer changes.
After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes
251–260 of 510 posts
Re: After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
In this scenario, how might one become a senior without first being a junior? Seniors just pop into existence?
The business leaders do not care about this yet. I think a lot of people think we already have more Seniors than we will need in the next 5-10 years. Also - the definition of Senior will change, and a lot of current Seniors will not transition, while plenty of Juniors that put in a lot of time using code agents will transition.
>while plenty of Juniors that put in a lot of time using code agents will transition.
But will they? I'm not at all convinced that babysitting an AI churning out volumes of code you don't understand will help you acquire the knowledge to understand and debug it.
Re: After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sloppy code that has been around for a while works. It likely has support for edge cases you forgot about. Often the sloppyness is because of those edge cases.
That's the incidental (necessary) vs accidental (avoidable) complexity distinction. But I don't think it makes it any easier to deal with.
those are different things. Often you don't plan for all the necessary things and so it doesn't fit in - even though a better design evists that would have it fit in neater - but only years latter do you see it and getting there is now a massive effort you can't afford. The result looks sloppy because on hindsight right is obvious
Re: After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes
#254> best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established The way I am working with AI agents (codex) these days is have the AI generate a spec in a series of MD documents where the AI implementation of each document is a bite sized chunk that can be tested and evaluated by the human before moving to the next step and roughly matches a commit in version control. The version control history reflects the logical pr…
Yes, more time on up front spec and plan building. Bite sized specifically to fit within the context window of a single implementation session. Each step should have a verification process that includes new tests.
Prior to each step, I prompt the AI to review the step and ask clarifying questions to fill any missing details. Then implement. Then prompt the AI after to review the changes for any fixes before moving on to the next step. Rinse, repeat.
The specs and plans are actually better for sharing context with the rest of the team than a traditional review process.
I find the code generated by this process to be better in general than the code I've generated over my previous 35+ years of coding. More robust, more complete, better tested. I used to "rush" through this process before, with less upfront planning, and more of a focus on getting a working scaffold up and running as fast as possible, with each step along the way implemented a bit quicker and less robustly, with the assumption I'd return to fix up the corner cases later.
Re: After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also when you are writing code yourself you are implicitly checking it whilst at the back of your mind retaining some form of the entire system as a whole. People seem to gloss over this... As a CEO if people don't function like this I'd be awake at night sweating.
That’s the reverse-centaur issue I see: humans are not great at repetitive nuanced similar seeming tasks, putting the onus on humans to retroactively approve high volumes of critical code has them managing a critical failure mode at their weakest and worst. Automated reviews should be enhancing known good-faith code, manual reviews of high volume superficially sound but subversive code is begging for issues over time…
I have found ai extreemly good at finding all those really hard bugs though. Ai is a greater force multiplier when there is a complex bug than in gneen field code.
Re: After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
The bet from various industry leaders appears to be that the current generation of engineers will be the last who will ever need to think about complex systems and engineering, as the AI will just get good enough to do all of that by the time they retire.
I think it’s deeper than that because it’s affected more industries than software and already started pre AI. American corporate culture has decided that training costs are someone else’s problem. Since every corporation acts this way it means all training costs have been pushed onto the labor market. Combine that with the past few decades of “oops, looks like you picked the wrong career that took years of learning a…
> we’re doing the industrial equivalent of eating our seed corn and there is seemingly no will to slow that trend down, much less reverse it.
I know I'm probably coming across as a lunatic lately on HN but I really do think we're on the path towards violence thanks to AI
You just cannot destroy this many people's livelihoods without backlash. It's leading nowhere good
But a handful of people are getting stupidly rich/richer so they'll never stop
Re: After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes
#257"Make senior engineer sign off ai-assisted changes" sounds incredibly weird.
First thing that comes to mind is: reminds me of those movie where some dictatorship starts to crumble and the dictator start being tougher and tougher on generals, not realizing the whole endeavor is doomed, not just the current implementation.
Then again, as a former amazon (aws) engineer: this is just not going to work. Depending how you define "senior engineer" (L5? L6? L7?) this is less and less feasible.
L5 engineers are already supposed to work pretty much autonomously, maybe with L6 sign-off when changes are a bit large in scope.
L6 engineers already have their own load of work, and a fairly large amount of engineers "under" them (anywhere from 5 to 8). Properly reviewing changes from all them, and taking responsibility for that, is going to be very taxing on such people.
L7 engineers work across teams and they might have anywhere from 12 to 30 engineers (L4/5/6) "under" them (or more). They are already scarce in number and they already pretty much mostly do reviews (which is proving not sufficient, it seems). Mandating sign-off and mandating assumption of responsibility for breaking changes means these people basically only do reviews and will be stricter and stricter[1] with engineers under them.
L8 engineers, they barely do any engineering at all, from what I remember. They mostly review design documents, in my experience not always expressing sound opinions or having proper understanding of the issues being handled.
In all this, considering the low morale (layoffs), the reduced headcount (layoffs) and the rise in expectations (engineers trying harder to stay afloat[2] due to... layoffs)... It's a dire situation.
I'm going to tell you, this stinks A LOT like rotting day 2 mindset.
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1. keep in mind you can't, in general, determine the absence of bugs
2. Also cranking out WAY MUCH MORE code due to having gen-ai tools at their fingertips...
Re: After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes
#258I think the deeper need is a "self-review" flow. People push AI-reviewed code like they wrote it. In the past, "wrote it" implies "reviewed it." With AI, that's no longer true. I advocate for GitHub and other code review systems to add a "Require self-review" option, where people must attest that they reviewed and approved their own code. This change might seem symbolic, but it clearly sets workflows and expectations…
Heck, doing a self review when you wrote the code catches stuff like forgetting debug prints.
Re: After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Worth it!
Re: After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Of course they don’t. Please reread what I said, give it the slightest bit of thought, and re-respond if you want a response from me.