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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

#211

Post by mhogers »

readthemanual wrote: post #170
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.

allowlist instead of denylist, depending on your risk profile :)

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

#212

Post by coredog64 »

8note wrote: post #136
belval wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There's an explicit tension: SWEs would love that as a "get out of jail free" card, but their management chain is being evaluated by ajassy on AI/ML adoption. Admitting AI code as the root cause of a CoE is gonna look really bad unless/until your peers are also copping to it.

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

#213

Post by thepasch »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #94
embedding-shape wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This meeting happens literally every week, and has for years. Feels like the media is making a mountain out of a mole hill here. Are you completely missing the point of the submission? It's not about "Amazon has a mandatory weekly meeting" but about the contents of that specific meeting, about AI-assisted tooling leading to "trends of incidents", having a "large blast radius" and "best practices and safeguards are…

>> Are you completely missing the point of the submission no, and that's what people are noting: the headline deliberately tries to blow this up into a big deal. When did you last see the HN post about Amazon's mandatory meeting to discuss a human-caused outage, or a post mortem? It's not because they don't happen...

> the headline deliberately tries to blow this up into a big deal

I do not understand how “company that runs half the internet has had major recent outages and now explicitly names lax/non-existent LLM usage guidelines as a major reason” can possibly not be a big deal in the midst of an industry-wide hype wave over how the world’s biggest companies now run agent teams shipping 150 pull requests an hour.

The chain of events is “AWS has been having a pretty awful time as far as outages go”, and now “result of an operational meeting is that the company will cut down on the use of autonomous AI.” You don’t need CoT-level reasoning to come to the natural conclusion here.

If we could, as a species, collectively, stop measuring the relevance of a piece of news proportionally by how much we like hearing it, please?

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

#214

Post by coredog64 »

cmiles8 wrote: post #111
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 core message of the article is that Amazon has been having issues with AI slop causing operational reliability concerns, and that seems to be 100% accurate.

/with AI slop//

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

#215

Post by age1mlclg6 »

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.

What has really happened is that those employees were made into "reverse centaurs":

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/...

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

#216

Post by riknos314 »

mattschaller wrote: post #49

Anyone work with Kiro before? As I understood, it was held as an INTERNAL USE ONLY tool for much longer than expected.

The technique of creating specs before implementation that Kiro embodies was used widely internally before Kiro's release, but as a (now former) employee I gained access to the Kiro tool at the same time as the public. Others may have had internal access earlier but I'm not aware of them.

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

#217

Post by js8 »

bluGill wrote: post #69
js8 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> requires an amount of time approaching the time spent if they had just done it themselves It's actually often harder to fix something sloppy than to write it from scratch. To fix it, you need to hold in your head both the original, the new solution, and calculate the difference, which can be very confusing. The original solution can also anchor your thinking to some approach to the problem, which you wouldn't have…

Sloppy code that has been around for a while works. It likely has support for edge cases you forgot about. Often the sloppyness is because of those edge cases.

That's the incidental (necessary) vs accidental (avoidable) complexity distinction. But I don't think it makes it any easier to deal with.

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

#218

Post by lukan »

ses1984 wrote: post #42
otterley wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Feels like the media is making a mountain out of a mole hill here. That's been their job ever since cable news was invented.

It’s been a bit longer than that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism It probably goes back as long as they have been shouting news in the town square in Rome or before that even.

Word around the campfire is, telling stories and exaggerating them to get people attention, is as old as humanity.

But good journalism is still something else.

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

#220

Post by marginalia_nu »

tmaly wrote: post #197
ansibsha wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> better-specified software Code is the most precise specification we have for interfacing with computers.

There are some cases where AI is generating binary machine code, albeit small amounts. What do we have when we don't have the code?

Machine code is still code, even if the representation is a bit less legible than the punch cards we used to use.
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