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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

#131

Post by onion2k »

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…

I.e. senior review is valuable, but it does not make bad code good.

I suspect that isn't the goal.

Review by more senior people shifts accountability from the Junior to a Senior, and reframes the problem from "Oh dear, the junior broke everything because they didn't know any better" to "Ah, that Senior is underperforming because they approved code that broke everything."

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

#132

Post by bluGill »

hard24 wrote: post #72
bluGill wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some, but not very much. Writing code is hard. Ai will do a lot of tedious code that you procrastinate writing.

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.

Sortof. I work on a system too large for anyone to know the whole thing. Often people who don't know each other do something that will break the other. (Often because of the number of different people - most individuals go years between this)

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

#133

Post by 8note »

cobolcomesback wrote: post #92
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.

It’s not false. But it’s also weaselly worded. Note that the article doesn’t say that he told staff they have to attend the meeting. It says he “asked” staff to attend the meeting. Which again, it’s really really normal for there to be an encouragement of “hey, since we just had an operational event, it would be good to prioritize attending this meeting where we discuss how to avoid operational events”. As for the se…

> senior engineers have always been required to sign off on changes from junior engineers.

definitely a team by team question. if it was required it would be a crux rule that the code review isnt approved without an l6 approver.

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

#134

Post by bluGill »

recursive wrote: post #130
tartoran wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You have to make sure it doesn't arrive at you before it is on the dashboard. Otherwise you are why it is blowing up the time to fix a bug metric. Unless you can make the problem so obscure other smart people asked to help you can't figure it out thus making you look bad.

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

#135

Post by Terr_ »

hard24 wrote: post #52
ritlo wrote: post #16

The only way to see the kinds of speed-up companies want from these things, right now, is to do way too little review. I think we're going to see a lot of failures in a lot of sectors where companies set goals for reduced hours on various things they do, based on what they expected from LLM speed-ups, and it will have turned out the only way to hit those goals was by spending way too little time reviewing LLM output.…

My prediction is a concorde-like incident is going to shatter trust and make people re-think their expectations of the capabilities of LLMs and their abilities of the present. Essentially something big has to happen that affects the revenue/trust of a large provider of goods, stemming from LLM-use. They wont go away entirely. But this idea that they can displace engineers at a high-rate will.

Assuming you mean this crash [0], it reads to me more like a confluence of bad events versus a big fundamental design flaw in the THERAC-25 mold.

I feel the current proliferation of LLMs is going to resemble asbestos problem: Cheap miracle thingy, overused in several places, with slow gradual regret and chronic harms/costs. Although I suppose the "undocumented nasty surprise" aspect would depend on adoption of local LLMs. If it's a monthly subscription to cloud-stuff, people are far less-likely to lose track of where the systems are and what they're doing.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_4590

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

#136

Post by 8note »

belval wrote: post #23
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.

I am not in that specific meeting but it made me chuckle that a weekly ops meeting will somehow get media attention. It's been an Amazon thing forever. Wait until the public learns about CoEs!

id.expect COEs to be coming up with AI code action items though, not to have more thorough human checks

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

#137

Post by to11mtm »

ritlo wrote: post #105
sdevonoes wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> even if they immediately throw the output in the metaphorical garbage bin.

Gotta be careful if you do that tho; e.x. Copilot can monitor 'accept' rate, so at bare minimum you'd have to accept the changes than immediately back them out...

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

#138

Post by rectang »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #125
rectang wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree that under default settings, LLMs introduce way too many changes and are way too willing to refactor everything. I was only able to get the situation under control by adding this standing instruction:

    ---
    applyTo: '**'
    ---
    By default:
    Make the smallest possible change.
    Do not refactor existing code unless I explicitly ask.
Under this, Claude Opus at least produces pretty reliable code with my methodology even under surprisingly challenging circumstances, and recent ChatGPTs weren't bad either (though I'm no longer using them). Less powerful LLMs struggle, though.

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

#139

Post by bonesss »

hard24 wrote: post #72
bluGill wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some, but not very much. Writing code is hard. Ai will do a lot of tedious code that you procrastinate writing.

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.

Which results the software engineering issue I’m not seeing addressed by the hype: bugs cost tens to hundreds of times their coding cost to resolve if they require internal or external communication to address. Even if everyone has been 10x’ed, the math still strongly favours not making mistakes in the first place.

An LLM workflow that yields 10x an engineer but psychopathically lies and sabotages client facing processes/resources once a quarter is likely a NNPP (net negative producing programmer), once opportunity and volatility costs are factored in.

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

#140

Post by almostdeadguy »

ritlo wrote: post #38
almostdeadguy wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry what? Junior engineers can't learn anything without using AI assistants (or is the implication that having seniors review their code makes them incapable of learning?) and senior engineer would hate their jobs reviewing more code from their teammates? What reality do people live in now?

> senior engineer would hate their jobs reviewing more code from their teammates Jesus, yes. Maybe I'm an oddball but there's a limit to how much PR reviewing I could do per week and stay sane. It's not terribly high, either. I'd say like 5 hours per week max , and no more than one hour per half-workday, before my eyes glaze over and my reviews become useless. Reviewing code is important and is part of the job but if…

If we can't spend that much time reviewing code, what are we exactly doing with this AI stuff?

I don't disagree, I think reviewing is laborious, I just don't see how this causes any unintended consequences that aren't effectively baked into using an AI assistant.

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