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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

#151

Post by [deleted] »

AgentOrange1234 wrote: post #143
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…

Seniors are going to need to hold Juniors to a high bar for understanding and explaining what they are committing. Otherwise it will become totally soul destroying to have a bunch of juniors submitting piles of nonsense and claiming they are blocked on you all the time.

[deleted]

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

#152

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

devonbleak wrote: post #100
jetrink wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could create the right sort of incentives though. If I'm a junior and I suddenly have to take my work to a senior every time I use AI, I'm going to be much more selective about how I use it and much more careful when I do use it. AI is dangerous because it is so frictionless and this is a way to add friction. Maybe I don't have the correct mental model for how the typical junior engineer thinks though. I never wan…

What you're actually going to see is seniors inundated by slop and burning out and quitting because what used to be enjoyable solving of problems has become wading through slop that took 10 minutes to generate and submit but 30+ minutes to understand and write up a critique for it.

In my experience, Claude and the juniors piloting it are usually receptive to quick feedback along the lines of "This is unreasonably hard to understand, please try refactoring it this way and let me know when it's cleaner".

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

#153

Post by BigTTYGothGF »

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…

> It says he “asked” staff to attend the meeting

Being "asked" by your boss to attend an optional meeting is pretty close to being required, it's just got a little anti-friction coating on it.

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

#154

Post by lmc »

butILoveLife wrote: post #108

Maybe 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.

LLMs have been garbage for real work until very recently. Doesn't this show they were adopted too soon at amazon?

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

#155

Post by marcta »

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.

Goodhart's Law strikes again... "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

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

#156

Post by slopinthebag »

ritlo wrote: post #74
locusofself wrote: post #50

Earlier 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…

Re. productivity, if LLM's are a genuine boost with 1/3 of the work, neutral 1/3 of the time, and actually worse 1/3 of the time, it's likely we aren't really seeing performance improvements as 1) people are using them for everything and b) we're still learning how to best use them.

So I expect over time we will see genuine performance improvements, but Amdahl's law dictates it won't be as much as some people and ceo's are expecting.

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

#157

Post by malfist »

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

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

#158

Post by slopinthebag »

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…

What's stopping someone from just having the AI churn out garbage all day long? Or like, put your AI into plan mode with extra high reasoning and have it churn for 10 minutes to make a microscopic change in some source file. Repeat ad infinium.

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

#159

Post by 0x500x79 »

daheza wrote: post #68
dragonelite wrote: post #24

Expect a shitload of AI powered code review products the next 18 months.

Create the problem and then create the solution.

Sell the solution. The Claude code review system is 15-25 dollars per-review!
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