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

Post by interestpiqued » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 10:51 PM UTC

ansibsha wrote: post #183

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…

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

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

MikeTheGreat wrote: post #301

djb_hackernews wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 las…

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

philip1209 wrote: post #249

I think the deeper need is a "self-review" flow. People push AI-reviewed code like they wrote it. In the past, "wrote it" implies "reviewed it." With AI, that's no longer true. I advocate for GitHub and other code review systems to add a "Require self-review" option, where people must attest that they reviewed and approved their own code. This change might seem symbolic, but it clearly sets workflows and expectations…

Post by throwaway613746 » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 10:59 PM UTC

sizzzzlerz wrote: post #313

Who fixes code that gets rejected? Do you simply try again and hope or does someone go into this computer-generated code that they didn't write and do the equivalent of battlefield triage? And what are they going to do when they've fired all the senior engineers because they make too much money, leaving just juniors and AI?

Post by ansibsha » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 11:00 PM UTC

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…