Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 510 posts

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

#121

Post by hard24 »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #90
marginalia_nu wrote: post #31

Earlier 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…

In my experience, inefficient code is rarely the issue outside of data engineering type ETL jobs. It’s mostly architectural. Inefficient code isn’t the reason your login is taking 30 seconds. Yes I know at Amazon/AWS scale (former employee) every efficiency matters. But even at Salesforce scale, ringing out every bit of efficiency doesn’t matter. No one cares about handcrafted artisanal code as long as it meets both…

"No one cares about handcrafted artisanal code as long as it meets both functional and non functional requirements"

Speak for yourself. I don't hire people like you.

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

#122

Post by qnleigh »

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…

Surely they know all this. They're worried about AI code degrading codebase quality, so they're putting on the brakes.

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

#123

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

hard24 wrote: post #121
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, inefficient code is rarely the issue outside of data engineering type ETL jobs. It’s mostly architectural. Inefficient code isn’t the reason your login is taking 30 seconds. Yes I know at Amazon/AWS scale (former employee) every efficiency matters. But even at Salesforce scale, ringing out every bit of efficiency doesn’t matter. No one cares about handcrafted artisanal code as long as it meets both…

"No one cares about handcrafted artisanal code as long as it meets both functional and non functional requirements" Speak for yourself. I don't hire people like you.

And guess what? You probably don’t pay as much as I make now either…

Even in late 2023 with the shit show of the current market, I had no issues having multiple offers within three weeks just by reaching out to my network and companies looking for people with my set of skills.

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

#124

Post by hard24 »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #123
hard24 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"No one cares about handcrafted artisanal code as long as it meets both functional and non functional requirements" Speak for yourself. I don't hire people like you.

And guess what? You probably don’t pay as much as I make now either… Even in late 2023 with the shit show of the current market, I had no issues having multiple offers within three weeks just by reaching out to my network and companies looking for people with my set of skills.

I field a small team of experts who are paid upwards of a million GBP in cold-hard cash in London. Not stock. Cash.

You sound like a bozo, I can sniff it through my screen.

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

#125

Post by marginalia_nu »

rectang wrote: post #119
marginalia_nu wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's where the Gell-Mann amnesia will get you though. As much it trips up on the domains you're familiar with, it also trips up in unfamiliar domains. You just don't see it.

You're not telling me anything I don't know already. Only a person who accepts that they're fallible can execute this methodology anyway, because that's the kind of mentality that it takes to think through potential failure modes. Yes, code produced this way will have bugs, especially of the "unknown unknown" variety — but so would the code that I would have written by hand. I think a bigger factor contributing to un…

Right, I think the latter part is my concern with AI generated code. Often it isn't easy to read (or as easy to read as it could be), and the harder it is to navigate, the more code problems the AI model introduces.

It introduces unnecessary indirection, additional abstractions, fails to re-use code. Humans do this too, but AI models can introduce this type of architectural rot much faster (because it's so fast), and humans usually notice when things start to go off the rails, whereas an AI model will just keep piling on bad code.

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

#126

Post by otterley »

Clent wrote: post #120
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.

Who is the media you're accusing here? This is a twitter post. As far as I can tell they do not work a media company. What is worth being pointed out is how quickly people blame "The Media" for how people use, consume and spread information on social networks.

The source is not a Twitter post, it's a Financial Times article (that the poster failed to cite).

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

#127

Post by otterley »

ses1984 wrote: post #42
otterley wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Feels like the media is making a mountain out of a mole hill here. That's been their job ever since cable news was invented.

It’s been a bit longer than that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism It probably goes back as long as they have been shouting news in the town square in Rome or before that even.

True enough!

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

#128

Post by prakhar897 »

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, an employee is worse off in all of the above compared to folks who will cheat to get ahead.

I can't see how "requesting" folks for forego their own self-preservation will work. especially when you've spent years pitting people against each other.

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

#129

Post by 8note »

ardeaver wrote: post #46
happytoexplain wrote: post #19

>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…

When I was really early in my career, a mentor told me that code review is not about catching bugs but spreading context (i.e. increasing bus factor.) Catching bugs is a side effect, but unless you have a lot of people review each pull request, it's basically just gambling. The more expensive and less sexy option is to actually make testing easier (both programmatically and manually), write more tests and more levels…

> The problem, I think, is people don't get promoted for preventing issues.

cleaning up structural issues across a couple orgs is a senior => principal promo ive seen a couple of times

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

#130

Post by recursive »

tartoran wrote: post #95
bluGill wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people don't get promoted for preventing issues. they do - but only after a company has been burned hard. They also can be promoted for their area being enough better that everyone notices. still the best way to a promotion is write a major bug that you can come in at the last moment and be the hero for fixing.

That could work but plenty of quiet heros weren’t promoted for fixing critical bugs.

They fixed it too soon. You have to wait until the effect is visible on someone's dashboard somewhere.
Post reply on HN