Yet another example of vibe coding at scale. You'll have to hire a lot of seniors out of retirement to fix that mess of gigantic proportions... and don't blame "the juniors" for that, they didn't make the decision to allow those tools at first place.
After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes
101–110 of 510 posts
Re: After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes
#102> 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.
Juniors could just code things the old fashioned way. It isn't hard. And if they do find it too hard, they aren't cut out for this job.
Aren't these companies mandating the use of these tools at first place? Juniors aren't the problem.
Re: After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Expert reviews are just about the only thing that makes AI generated code viable, though doing them after the fact is a bit sketchy, to be efficient you kinda need to keep an eye on what the model is doing as its working. Unchecked, AI models output code that is as buggy as it is inefficient. In smaller green field contexts, it's not so bad, but in a large code base, it's performs much worse as it will not have acces…
> Expert reviews are just about the only thing that makes AI generated code viable I disagree, in the sense that an engineer who knows how to work with LLMs can produce code which only needs light review. * Work in small increments * Explicitly instruct the LLM to make minimal changes * Think through possible failure modes * Build in error-checking and validation for those failure modes * Write tests which exercise a…
By the time you're working in increments small enough that it doesn't introduce significant issues, you really might as well write the code yourself.
Re: After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes
#104The excessive exuberance of AI adoption is all part of the bubble.
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Re: After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Juniors could just code things the old fashioned way. It isn't hard. And if they do find it too hard, they aren't cut out for this job.
But aren’t companies enforcing AI usage? If noy, wait for it
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 in the metaphorical garbage bin.
It's basically an even-more-ridiculous version of ranking programmers by lines-of-code/week.
What's especially comical is I've seen enormous gains in my (longish, at this point) career from learning other tools (e.g. expanding my familiarity with Unix or otherwise fairly common command line tools) and never, ever has anyone measured how much I'm using them, and never, ever has management become in any way involved in pushing them on me. It's like the CEO coming down to tell everyone they'll be making sure all the programmers are using regular expressions enough, and tracking time spent engaging with regular expressions, or they'll be counting how many breakpoints they're setting in their debuggers per week. WTF? That kind of thing should be leads' and seniors' business, to spread and encourage knowledge and appropriate tool use among themselves and with juniors, to the degree it should be anyone's business. Seems like yet another smell indicating that this whole LLM boom is built on shaky ground.
Re: After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes
#106>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 reviews are useful, but as I understand it, Amazon has a fairly high turnover rate, so I wonder just how many seniors with deep knowledge of the codebase they could possibly have.
From engineers are interchangeable to high turnover are decisions that the company took. The payback time always comes at some point.
Re: After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Expert reviews are just about the only thing that makes AI generated code viable I disagree, in the sense that an engineer who knows how to work with LLMs can produce code which only needs light review. * Work in small increments * Explicitly instruct the LLM to make minimal changes * Think through possible failure modes * Build in error-checking and validation for those failure modes * Write tests which exercise a…
By the time you're working in increments small enough that it doesn't introduce significant issues, you really might as well write the code yourself.
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.
Re: After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes
#108Maybe 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.
Re: After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you spend 5-15x the time reviewing what the LLM is doing, are you saving any time by using it?
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…
> because the time will just go into tests that wouldn't otherwise have been written
Writing tests to ensure a program is correct is the same problem as writing a correct program.
Evaluating conformance is a different category of concern from ensuring correctness. Tests are about conformance not correctness.
Ensuring correct programs is like cleaning in the sense that you can only push dirt around, you can't get rid of it.
You can push uncertainty around and but you can't eliminate it.
This is the point of Gödel's theorem. Shannon's information theory observes similar aspects for fidelity in communication.
As Douglas Adams noted: ultimately you've got to know where your towel is.
Re: After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes
#110>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…
LGTM