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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

#271

Post by [deleted] »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #191
ansibsha wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No you’re not. The “how” is your job to understand, and if you don’t you’ll end up like the devs in the article. We as an industry have been able to offload a lot of “how” via deterministic systems built by humans with expert understanding. LLMs give you the illusion of this.

No in my case the “how” is 1. I spoke to sales to find out about the customer 2. I read every line of the contract (SOW) 3. I did the initial requirements gathering over a couple of days with the client - or maybe up to 3 weeks 3. I designed every single bit of AWS architecture and code 4. I did the design review with the client 5. I led the customer acceptance testing > We as an industry have been able to offload a…

[deleted]

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

#272

Post by rsynnott »

rectang wrote: post #107
marginalia_nu wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the time you're working in increments small enough that it doesn't introduce significant issues, you really might as well write the code yourself.

That's not my experience — I'm significantly faster while guiding an LLM using this methodology. The gains are especially notable when working in unfamiliar domains. I can glance over code and know "if this compiles and the tests succeed, it will work", even if I didn't have the knowledge to write it myself.

> I can glance over code and know "if this compiles and the tests succeed, it will work", even if I didn't have the knowledge to write it myself.

... Errr... Yeah, that's not a great approach, unless you are defining 'work' extremely vaguely.

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

#273

Post by layer8 »

_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…

A competent programmer proves the program he writes correct in his head. He can certainly make mistakes in that, but it’s very different from writing tests, because proofs abstract (or quantify) over all states and inputs, which tests cannot do.

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

#275

Post by osigurdson »

cmiles74 wrote: post #263
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!

A weekly ops meeting where they talk about ensuring PRs with AI contributions get extra scrutiny? I think that's significant news.

Exactly. This is real world pushback on the "software is solved" narrative from AI labs. Also, most orgs try to copy Amazon for some reason more than big tech firms. "At our org, we disagree and commit" - yeah you made that one up yourself. Anyway, this is going to have a lot of impact in my view.

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

#276

Post by emp17344 »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #222
thepasch wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Way too many people have tied their egos to the success of AI.

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

#278

Post by BikiniPrince »

chatmasta wrote: post #246
malfist wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over the weekend I was trying to return a pair of shoes and get a different size and I kept getting 500s trying to go to the store page for the shoes.

Funny, I was automatically refunded for a pair of shoes that Amazon thought I never received even though I’m wearing them right now. I couldn’t even find a way to dispute the refund so I just took the win…

That explains why it kept changing the estimated received date. It was doing weird things.

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

#280

Post by lovich »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #256
lovich wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s deeper than that because it’s affected more industries than software and already started pre AI. American corporate culture has decided that training costs are someone else’s problem. Since every corporation acts this way it means all training costs have been pushed onto the labor market. Combine that with the past few decades of “oops, looks like you picked the wrong career that took years of learning a…

> we’re doing the industrial equivalent of eating our seed corn and there is seemingly no will to slow that trend down, much less reverse it. I know I'm probably coming across as a lunatic lately on HN but I really do think we're on the path towards violence thanks to AI You just cannot destroy this many people's livelihoods without backlash. It's leading nowhere good But a handful of people are getting stupidly rich…

I don't think you're a lunatic.

If you look at the luddite rebellion they weren't actually against industrial technology like looms. They were against being told they weren't needed anymore and thrown to the wolves because of the machines.

The rich have forgotten they are made of meat and/or are planning on returning to feudalism ala Yarvin, Thiel, Musk, and co's politics.

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