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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

#351

Post by bigstrat2003 »

lmc wrote: post #154
butILoveLife wrote: post #108

Maybe its my 1 buddy that works at amazon, but they seemed extremely slow to adopt LLMs. Big ships take a long time to turn, but this seemed hostile. I am seeing this mindset still, with AI Agents. I imagine they will slowly realize they need to use this stuff to be competitive, but being slow to adopt AI seems like it could have been the source of this.

LLMs have been garbage for real work until very recently. Doesn't this show they were adopted too soon at amazon?

They're still garbage for real work.

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

#354

Post by falsemyrmidon »

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.

It's not extra scrutiny. Doing code reviews for every commit is a standard practice at Amazon and has been for a decade plus.

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

#355

Post by testbjjl »

Then what’s the point of AI? Pay for the code gen, pay a human to review the code gen, when the senior can train a junior and coordinate output with their incentives and performance reviews, problems largely solved.

Seems to me too low level in everyone’s stack to not have humans doing the work, especially at this stage. But what do I know, I certainly am not at the helm of a multibillion dollar operation.

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

#356

Post by dpark »

delecti wrote: post #328
brewdad wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely your boss notices your non-attendance.

If it's actually really mandatory, my manager will probably also relay that directly to me. And that resets the count for "less mandatory the more layers up you go".

Starting to wonder if some people who complain about all day meetings just don’t realize they are optional.

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

#357

Post by sizzzzlerz »

rhubarbtree wrote: post #330
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?

AI will fix it, same way AI wrote it. At the behest of a human. When they fire everyone, juniors will fix it with AI. This is in general. I wouldn’t recommend this at critical services like AWS.

Or in airplanes, nuclear power plants, spacecraft, CAT scanners, ECGs, traffic control systems, navigation devices, warehouse management systems, banking. Feel free to add your own.

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

#358

Post by hyperpape »

wolvoleo wrote: post #344
hyperpape wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but if you say something essential in a meeting with 10 people and it has to percolate through five levels of management to reach the front-lines and gets watered down, that could be much more lost, even millions. Scale cuts both ways. What matters isn't how big the meeting is, it's how important the material is, and how well presented it is.

I don't think I've ever heard a top leader say anything essential in such a meeting. The stuff they work on is not related to my job at all. It's all gartner level strategy stuff. In our company they do take time talking about it in large calls but it's always boring and never relevant. And a lot of political spin you have to poke through to see the real message. If I ever attend it just put it on mute and look at th…

Most of those meetings are pretty damn fluffy. No one goes back to their desk and does anything different because they've introduced new company values and the acronym is S.M.I.L.E.

But this meeting is a course correction for how they're using AI, which is a huge initiative. He'll be trying to sell the right balance of "keep using the technology, but don't fuck anything up."

Too cautious, everyone freezes and there's a slowdown[0]. Too soft, everyone thinks it's "another empty warning not to fuck up" and they go right back to fucking everything up because the real message was "don't you dare slow down." After the talk, people will have conversations about "what did they really mean?"

[0] If you hate AI, feel free to flip the direction of the effect.

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

#359

Post by MarkSweep »

SchemaLoad wrote: post #304
unshavedyak wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

Rejecting a PR for being overly complicated or difficult to understand is valid. Breaking a large change into understandable pieces is an important skill both for making changes reviewable as well as helping the author understand the problem.

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

#360

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

ansibsha wrote: post #329
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, and trusting an LLM here is not a good idea. You know it will make important mistakes. I’m not saying trusting cheap devs is a good idea either. I do think cheap devs are actually at risk here.

I am not “trusting” either - I’m validating that they meet the functional and non functional requirements just like with an LLM. I have never blindly trusted any developer when my neck was the one on the line in front of my CTO/director or customer.

I didn’t blindly trust the Salesforce consultants either. I also didn’t verify every line of oSql (not a typo) they wrote.

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