Hope this happens at GitHub since there are constant outages on the entire platform.
After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes
201–210 of 510 posts
Re: After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes
#202Earlier 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.
That's not really what the headline attempts to communicate though. It specifically emphasizes "Mandatory" and "AI breaking things". Nobody was going to click on "Regularly scheduled Amazon staff meeting will include discussion on operational improvement"
> He asked staff to attend the meeting, which is normally optional.
If I get a note from my boss like that, I consider it mandatory.
Re: After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes
#203From 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…
> 2. Having Less comments on their PRs: for some drastically dumb reason, having a PR thoroughly reviewed
I'm very far away from liking Amazon's engineering culture and general work culture, but having PRs with countless of discussions and feedback on it does signal that you've done a lot of work without collaborating with others before doing the work. Generally in teams that work well together and build great software, the PRs tend to have very little on them, as most of the issues were resolved while designing together with others.
Re: After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes
#204I wonder how this will work in practice. Say I'm a senior engineer and I produce myself thousands of lines of code per day with the help of LLMs as mandated by the company. I still need to presumably read and test the code that I push to production. When will I have time to read and evaluate similar amounts of code produced by a junior or a mid level engineer ?
>> I wonder how this will work in practice. Say I'm a senior engineer and I produce myself thousands of lines of code per day with the help of LLMs as mandated by the company.
LOL, it's the age old "responsibility without authority". The pressure to use AI will increase and basically you'll be fired for not using it. Simultaneously with the pressure to take the blame when AI fucks up and you can't keep up with the bullshit, leading you to get fired. One way or the other, get some training on how to stack shelves at the supermarket because that's how our future looks, one way or the other.
Re: After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes
#205Re: After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes
#206Speed of code-writing was never the issue at Amazon or AWS. It was always wrong-headed strategic directions, out to lunch PMs, dogshit testing environment, stakeholder soup, high turnover, bureaucracy, a pantheon of legacy systems, insane operational burdens, garbage tooling, and last but not last -- designing for inter-system failure modes, which let's be real, AI has no chance of having context for -- and so on...
Imagine if the #1 problem of your woodworking shop is staff injuries, and the solution that management foists on you is higher RPM lathes.
Re: After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes because I didn’t check to see if Claude code used a for loop instead of a while loop? Or that it didn’t use my preferred GOF pattern and didn’t use what I read in “Clean Code”? Guess what? I also stopped caring how registers are used and counting clock cycles in my assembly language code like it’s the 80s and I’m still programming on a 1Mhz 65C02
I can see the argument both ways. Some code is just not worth looking at... But do you look at any of the AI output? Or is it just "it works, ship it"?
My last project was basically an ETL implementation on AWS starting with an empty AWS account and a internal web admin site that had 10 pages. I am yada yada yadaing over a little bit.
What I checked.
1. The bash shell scripts I had it write as my integration test suite
2. To make sure it wasn’t loading the files into Postgres the naive way -loading the file from S3 and doing bulk inserts instead of using the AWS extension that lets it load directly from S3. It’s the differ xe between taking 20 minutes and 20 seconds.
3. I had strict concurrency and failure recovery requirements. I made sure it was done the right way.
4. Various security, logging, log retention requirements
What I didn’t look at - a line of the code for the web admin site. I used AWS Cognito for authentication and checked to make sure that unauthorized users couldn’t use the website. Even that didn’t require looking at the code - I had automated tests that tested all of the endpoints.
Re: After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes
#208>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…
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…
Sadly, the way people become expert in a codebase is through coding. The process of coding is the process of learning. If we offload the coding to AI tools we will never be as expert in the codebase, its complexity, its sharp corners, or its unusual requirements. While you can apply general best practices for a code review you can never do as much as if you really got your hands dirty first.
"Seniors will do expert review" will slowly collapse.
Re: After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes
#209>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…
> Review by a senior is one of the biggest "silver bullet" illusions managers suffer from
Especially in a big co like Amazon, most senior engineers are box drawers, meeting goers, gatekeepers, vision setters, org lubricants, VP's trustees, glorified product managers, and etc. They don't necessarily know more context than the more junior engineers, and they most likely will review slowly while uncovering fewer issues.
Re: After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Exactly. It's just West coast passive aggressive managerial behavior.