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

Post by znpy » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 9:53 PM UTC

malfist wrote: post #245

beardedetim wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I don't understand about this policy. There's no way a senior has enough spare capacity to be the gate keeper on every PR made by AI below them. So now we are just making it so the senior people use more AI to keep up but now they're to blame for letting it happen. It sounds like a piss poor deal for seniors unless senior engineer now means professional code reviewer.

That's amazon in a nutshell though. Create conflicting metrics for performance, push credit up and responsibility down, punish everyone below you for not meeting the double standards

Post by cmiles74 » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 9:56 PM UTC

belval wrote: post #23

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!

Post by mentos » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 9:58 PM UTC

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 10:00 PM UTC

_wire_ wrote: post #109

ritlo wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> because the time will just go into tests that wouldn't otherwise have been written Writing tests to ensure a program is correct is the same problem as writing a correct program. Evaluating conformance is a different category of concern from ensuring correctness. Tests are about conformance not correctness. Ensuring correct programs is like cleaning in the sense that you can only push dirt around, you can't get rid…

Post by ryandrake » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 10:01 PM UTC

cobolcomesback wrote: post #230

BigTTYGothGF wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.