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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

#371

Post by malfist »

znpy wrote: post #261
malfist wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> Create conflicting metrics for performance, push credit up and responsibility down, punish everyone below you for not meeting the double standards This resonates with my experience. The only thing you forgot is that you can also use the 12^H^H 14 leadership principles to argue whatever you want (and then the opposite of what you argued last month, still using the same leadership principles).

Got a project finished early? Well, you didn't insist on the highest standards. Made sure things were held to a high standard? Well, you weren't biased for action.

Were you a knowledge source for the entire team? Well, you weren't learning and being curious. Did you ask a lot of questions to learn everything? Well, then you weren't "are right a lot".

Did you think big and come up with an architecture that saved Amazon a lot of money? Then you weren't inventing and simplifying. Build something simple to get out out the door quick? Well, you weren't thinking big.

Did you act quickly without consulting others to fix an issue? Well you weren't earning trust. Did you consult people to make sure they were happy with the solution? Well you weren't biased for action.

Thats just a few examples, there's so many more

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

#372

Post by 8note »

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…

the tooling doesnt make it easy currently.

working at amazon, when I wanted to review code myself through the CR tool, Id still end up publishing it to the whole team and have to add some title shenanigans saying it was a self review or WIP and for others to not look at it yet

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

#373

Post by 8note »

SoftTalker wrote: post #59
ritlo wrote: post #16

The only way to see the kinds of speed-up companies want from these things, right now, is to do way too little review. I think we're going to see a lot of failures in a lot of sectors where companies set goals for reduced hours on various things they do, based on what they expected from LLM speed-ups, and it will have turned out the only way to hit those goals was by spending way too little time reviewing LLM output.…

So will it turn out that actually writing code was never the time sink in the first place? That has always been my feeling. Once I really understand what I need to implement, the code is the easy part. Sure it takes some time, but it's not the majority. And for me, actually writing the code will often trigger some additional insight or awareness of edge cases that I hadn't considered.

At least with my experience at amazon it wasnt.

if i wanted, i could queue up weeks worth of review in a couple days, but that's not getting the whole team more productive.

Spending more time on documents and chatting proved much more useful for getting more output overall.

Even without LLMs ive been nearby and on teams where review burden from developers building away team code was already so high that youd need to bake an extra month into your estimates for getting somebody to actually look.

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

#374

Post by booleandilemma »

paxys wrote: post #364

Someone should teach the decision makers how pipelines work. If AI-created diffs are being churned out at 10x the previous rate but manual reviews are the bottleneck then the overall system is producing at the exact same rate as before. The only thing you have added is cost, uncertainty and engineers being less familiar with the system.

The next thing these geniuses will think of will be to have AI review the diffs.

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

#376

Post by 8note »

fmajid wrote: post #284

If they do not also increase the senior devs’ allotted time for code reviews to make up for the increased volume of changes due to increased productivity of the junior to mid level devs, or hire more seniors, this will just lead to burnout (on top of Amazon’s already high levels) and scapegoating seniors for having waved through a change because they materially can’t review them fast enough.

Id maybe consider spinning out a different job role for like "review engineer" who's not busy making strategic decisions and near term planning, just making sure the code is actually good

still within the engineering IC role, but on a different track

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

#378

Post by ummonk »

baal80spam wrote: post #225
slopinthebag wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's stopping someone from just having the AI churn out garbage all day long? Or like, put your AI into plan mode with extra high reasoning and have it churn for 10 minutes to make a microscopic change in some source file. Repeat ad infinium.

> What's stopping someone from just having the AI churn out garbage all day long? In my case it's morality.

I would argue that making the company experience the consequences of its choice of metrics / mandates is in fact a moral imperative.

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

#379

Post by [deleted] »

ummonk wrote: post #378
baal80spam wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's stopping someone from just having the AI churn out garbage all day long? In my case it's morality.

I would argue that making the company experience the consequences of its choice of metrics / mandates is in fact a moral imperative.

[deleted]

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

#380

Post by wolvoleo »

hyperpape wrote: post #358
wolvoleo wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well this is the main problem with AI right now isn't it? How to use it successfully without having it fuck up.

How are they expecting some juniors to do this when the industry as a whole doesn't know where to begin yet?

Like that Meta AI expert who wiped her whole mailbox with openclaw. These are the people who should come up with the answers.

Ps I mostly hate AI but I do see some potential. Right now it feels like we're entering a fireworks bunker looking for a pot of gold and having only a box of matches for illumination.

What we need to know from management is exactly what you mention. Do we go all out and accept that shit will hit the fan once in a while (the old move fast and break things) or do we micromanage and basically work manually like old. And that they accept the risk either way. That kind of strategy is really business leader kind of work. Blaming it on your techs when it inevitably goes wrong is not.

Because the tech as it is right now is very non-deterministic. One day it works magic and the next day it blows up.

And yes that SMILE thing was a good example. Been in too many of those time wasters.

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