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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

#161

Post by tavavex »

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…

> 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.

That's because they weren't sold regex as as service by a massive company, while also being reassured by everyone that any person not using at least one regular expression per line of code is effectively worthless and exposes their business to a threat of immediate obsolescence and destruction. They finally found a way to sell the same kind of FOMO to a majority of execs in the software industry.

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

#162

Post by radiator »

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…

> Senior leadership doesn’t know this, though.

Well, you'd think senior leadership should know how their business and their people work.

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

#163

Post by tavavex »

to11mtm wrote: post #137
ritlo wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

In a couple years, we'll have office workspaces equipped with EEG helmets that you must wear while working, to measure your sentiment upon seeing LLM-generated code. The worst performers get the boot, so you better be happy!

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

#164

Post by suzzer99 »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #152
devonbleak wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Can I interest you in a bunch of emoji-laden comments?

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

#166

Post by radiator »

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…

Deming's point 3 (of 14): Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need for massive inspection by building quality into the product in the first place.

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

#167

Post by 10xDev »

throw_m239339 wrote: post #101

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.

A lot of juniors only graduated using these tools. Good luck taking it away from them.

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

#168

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #113
rectang wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Besides building web apps for internal use, I’m never going to let AI architect something I’m not familiar with. I could care less whether it uses “clean code” or what design pattern it uses. Meaning I will go from an empty AWS account to fully fledged app + architecture because I’ve been coding for 30 years and dealing with every book and cranny of AWS for a decade.

But I would never do the same for Azure.

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

#169

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#170

Post by readthemanual »

mhogers wrote: post #165

.agentignore/.agentnotallowed file force agents to not touch mission critical things, fail in CI otherwise let it work on frontends and things at the frontier of the dependency tree, where it is worth the risk

a) what happens if there is change that hasn't been encountered yet so it's not in .agentnotallowed? b) is there a guarantee that something described in these files won't be touched? I've seen examples when agents directly violate these rules, profusely apologising after they get caught on it.
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