Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 510 posts

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

#301

Post by MikeTheGreat »

djb_hackernews wrote: post #233
davidclark wrote: post #21

Earlier 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.

When an SVP asks you to do something in a mass email, it's very much optional. Dave Treadwell is an SVP, his org is likely in the 10's of thousands, there is no way to even have a mandatory meeting for that many people. My SVP asks me to do things all the time, indirectly. I do probably 5% of them.

> org is likely in the 10's of thousands, there is no way to even have a mandatory meeting for that many people.

Ok, this is pretty off-topic, but is this still true? I get that you can't have 10K people all actively participate in the meeting at the same time, but doesn't Zoom have a feature where you can broadcast to thousands and thousands?

Doesn't X/Twitter have a feature like this? (Although, to be fair, the last time I heard about that it was part of a headline like "DeSantis announcement of Presidential run on X/Twitter delayed for hours as X/Twitter's tech stack collapses under 200K viewers")

But still - nowadays it seems like it should be possible to have 10K employees all tune in at the same time and then call it a meeting, yes?

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

#302

Post by VorpalWay »

I'm bewildered by Amazon here. I would assume every change require code review by another enigneer already, as is standard practice in the industry I work in (industrial equipment). Is the change just that it has to be a senior engineer specifically, rather than any engineer? Or did Amazon really not have mandatory code review before?

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

#303

Post by airstrike »

FuckButtons wrote: post #294
javcasas wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With tens of thousands in a meeting, cracking a 30-second stupid joke is probably costing several thousand dollars.

If you assume everyone is making 100k it only takes 20 people in a meeting for it to cost 1k.

Wasn't it Shopify who had a system for tracking how much each meeting cost based on attendees? I may be misremembering the company though

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

#304

Post by SchemaLoad »

unshavedyak wrote: post #295
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…

> 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, requires an amount of time approaching the time spent if they had just done it themselves. Hell, often it feels slower/worse. Foreign code is easily confusing at first, which slows you…

So many times I get AI generated PRs from juniors where I don't feel comfortable with the code, I wouldn't do it like this myself, but I can't strictly find faults that I can reject the PR with. Usually it's just a massive amount of code being generated which is extremely difficult to review, much harder than it was for the submitter to generate and send it for review.

Then often it blows up in production. Makes me almost want to blanket reject PRs for being too difficult to understand. Hand written code almost has an aversion to complexity, you'd search around for existing examples, libraries, reusable components, or just a simpler idea before building something crazy complex. While with AI you can spit out your first idea quickly no matter how complex or flawed the original concept was.

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

#305

Post by joquarky »

bluGill wrote: post #60
ardeaver wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was really early in my career, a mentor told me that code review is not about catching bugs but spreading context (i.e. increasing bus factor.) Catching bugs is a side effect, but unless you have a lot of people review each pull request, it's basically just gambling. The more expensive and less sexy option is to actually make testing easier (both programmatically and manually), write more tests and more levels…

> people don't get promoted for preventing issues. they do - but only after a company has been burned hard. They also can be promoted for their area being enough better that everyone notices. still the best way to a promotion is write a major bug that you can come in at the last moment and be the hero for fixing.

That is in no way guaranteed. Sometimes finding too many security issues makes you unpopular.

Two years afterward, we got hit with ransomware. And obviously "I told you so" isn't a productive discussion topic at that point.

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

#306

Post by 999900000999 »

dboreham wrote: post #229
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.

At least in the past the idea is you do the dance , vest and leave.

I missed my FAANG chance during the good years. No retirement for me!

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

#307

Post by bluefirebrand »

almostdeadguy wrote: post #140
ritlo wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> senior engineer would hate their jobs reviewing more code from their teammates Jesus, yes. Maybe I'm an oddball but there's a limit to how much PR reviewing I could do per week and stay sane. It's not terribly high, either. I'd say like 5 hours per week max , and no more than one hour per half-workday, before my eyes glaze over and my reviews become useless. Reviewing code is important and is part of the job but if…

If we can't spend that much time reviewing code, what are we exactly doing with this AI stuff? I don't disagree, I think reviewing is laborious, I just don't see how this causes any unintended consequences that aren't effectively baked into using an AI assistant.

Yes, this is part of why AI tools are bad

Code Review is hard and tiring, much moreso than writing it

I've never met anyone who would be okay reviewing code for their full time job

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

#308

Post by ummonk »

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...

Amazon has had a really bad string of various outages recently. Assuming they're internally treating this as business as usual in post-mortems then perhaps the newsworthy thing is actually that they aren't taking their outages seriously enough.

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

#310

Post by shepherdjerred »

VorpalWay wrote: post #302

I'm bewildered by Amazon here. I would assume every change require code review by another enigneer already, as is standard practice in the industry I work in (industrial equipment). Is the change just that it has to be a senior engineer specifically, rather than any engineer? Or did Amazon really not have mandatory code review before?

Code review is mandatory at Amazon
Post reply on HN