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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

#21

Post by davidclark »

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.

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.

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

#22

Post by frogperson »

dude250711 wrote: post #13

I knew this would happen. Take a perfectly productive senior developer and instead make him be responsible for output of a bunch of AI juniors with the expectation of 10x output.

makes me want to vomit. I am not spending more time reviewing code than the "author" spent creating it. Ill just leave the industry if that happens.

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

#23

Post by belval »

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!

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

#25

Post by belval »

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…

The unwritten thing is that if you need seniors to review every single change from junior and mid-level engineers, and those engineers are mostly using Kiro to write their CRs, then what stops the senior from just writing the CRs with Kiro themselves?

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

#26

Post by steveBK123 »

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…

Right, code reviews should already have been happening with human written junior code.

If AI is a productivity boost and juniors are going to generate 10x the PRs, do you need 10x the seniors (expensive) or 1/10th the juniors (cost save).

A reminder that in many situations, pure code velocity was never the limiting factor.

Re: idiot prooofing I think this is a natural evolution as companies get larger they try to limit their downside & manage for the median rather than having a growth mindset in hiring/firing/performance.

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

#27

Post by lokar »

If this is true, it misunderstands the primary goals of code review.

Code review should not be (primarily) about catching serious errors. If there are always a lot of errors, you can’t catch most of them with review. If there are few it’s not the best use of time.

The goal is to ensure the team is in sync on design, standards, etc. To train and educate Jr engineers, to spread understanding of the system. To bring more points of view to complex and important decisions.

These goals help you reduce the number of errors going into the review process, this should be the actual goal.

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

#29

Post by almostdeadguy »

sethops1 wrote: post #18

> 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.

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?

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

#30

Post by AlexeyBrin »

dragonelite wrote: post #24

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

You mean like what Anthropic announced yesterday ? Code Review can review your code for $15 - $25 per review.

/s

So now, you can speed up using Claude Code and use Code Review to keep it in check.

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