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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

#221

Post by s3p »

davidclark wrote: post #21
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.

>>He asked staff to attend the meeting, which is normally optional. >Is that false?

Judging from the comment above, no, the meeting happens every week, and this week they were asked to attend.

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

#222

Post by mattgreenrocks »

thepasch wrote: post #213
skeeter2020 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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…

The defensiveness is almost as interesting as the meeting itself.

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

#223

Post by dboreham »

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…

Bingo. Hopefully there are some business opportunities for us in that truth.

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

#224

Post by munk-a »

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…

Reviewing code changes (generally) takes more time than writing code changes for a pretty significant chunk of engineers. If we're optimizing slop code writing at the expense of more senior's time being funneled into detailed reviews then we're _doing it wrong_.

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

#225

Post by baal80spam »

slopinthebag wrote: post #158
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…

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.

> What's stopping someone from just having the AI churn out garbage all day long?

In my case it's morality.

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

#226

Post by cobolcomesback »

thepasch wrote: post #213
skeeter2020 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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…

The message and meeting being discussed here have nothing to do with AWS or any outages AWS has faced recently. I think you’re missing the point of the discussion.

I don’t blame you, because this is just bad reporting (and potentially intentionally malicious to make you think it’s about AWS). But the meeting and discussion was with the Amazon retail teams, talking about Amazon retail processes, and Amazon retail services. The teams and processes that handle this are entirely separate from any AWS outages you are thinking of.

The outages that Amazon retail has faced also have nothing to do with AI, and there was no “explicit call out” about AI causing anything.

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

#229

Post by dboreham »

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…

4. Don't work in the corporate equivalent of The Hunger Games.

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

#230

Post by cobolcomesback »

BigTTYGothGF wrote: post #153
cobolcomesback wrote: post #92

Earlier 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.

That really isn’t the culture at Amazon. There are all-team meetings that happen all the time, and every now and then there is a reminder that “hey we’re gonna be talking about an interesting topic so you might want to join”, but it is certainly not a mandate or expectation that everyone will join.

Different companies have different cultures. Weird that people can’t grok this.

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