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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

#41

Post by zdragnar »

almostdeadguy wrote: post #29
sethops1 wrote: post #18

> The response for now? Junior and mid-level engineers can no longer push AI-assisted code without a senior signing off. So basically, kill the productivity of senior engineers, kill the ability for junior engineers to learn anything, and ensure those senior engineers hate their jobs. Bold move, we'll see how that goes.

I'm sorry what? Junior engineers can't learn anything without using AI assistants (or is the implication that having seniors review their code makes them incapable of learning?) and senior engineer would hate their jobs reviewing more code from their teammates? What reality do people live in now?

I thought the implication was that juniors would continue to use AI to stay "productive" (AWS is not a rest and vest job for juniors, from what I've heard) and seniors would no longer have time to do anything but review code from juniors who just spin the AI wheel.

There's a lot of learning opportunity in failing, but if failure just means spam the AI button with a new prompt, there's not much learning to be had.

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

#42

Post by ses1984 »

otterley wrote: post #17
cobolcomesback wrote: post #11

This “mandatory meeting” is just the usual weekly company-wide meeting where recent operational issues are discussed. There was a big operational issue last week, so of course this week will have more attendance and discussion. This meeting happens literally every week, and has for years. Feels like the media is making a mountain out of a mole hill here.

> Feels like the media is making a mountain out of a mole hill here. That's been their job ever since cable news was invented.

It’s been a bit longer than that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism

It probably goes back as long as they have been shouting news in the town square in Rome or before that even.

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

#43

Post by kotaKat »

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #33
cobolcomesback wrote: post #11

This “mandatory meeting” is just the usual weekly company-wide meeting where recent operational issues are discussed. There was a big operational issue last week, so of course this week will have more attendance and discussion. This meeting happens literally every week, and has for years. Feels like the media is making a mountain out of a mole hill here.

It didn't seem to make the news but at least in NYC the entire Amazon storefront was broken all afternoon on Friday. Items weren't displaying prices and it was impossible to add anything to your cart. It lasted from about 2pm to 5pm. It's especially strange because if a computer glitch brought down a large retail competitor like Walmart I probably would have seen something even though their sales volume is lower.

A little birdie told me someone pushed duplicate data into one of Amazon’s core noSQL systems that runs most of e-commerce. The front end of the site broke in weird ways but it certainly wasn’t taking orders.

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

#44

Post by niwtsol »

cobolcomesback wrote: post #11

This “mandatory meeting” is just the usual weekly company-wide meeting where recent operational issues are discussed. There was a big operational issue last week, so of course this week will have more attendance and discussion. This meeting happens literally every week, and has for years. Feels like the media is making a mountain out of a mole hill here.

I believe it is by group - AWS started the weekly operations meeting, effectively every service's oncall from the last week had to attend. Then it grew massive, so they made it optional. Alexa had a similar meeting that tried to replicate what AWS did. A lot of time spent reviewing load tests getting ready for holiday season, prime day, and the superbowl (super bowl ads used to cause crazy TPS spikes for Alexa). And a lot of finger pointing if there was an outage from one team. While it probably did help raise the operational bar, so much time wasted by engineers on busywork/paperwork documenting an error or fix vs improving the actual service.

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

#45

Post by MDGeist »

A former colleague of mine recently took a role that has largely turned out to be "greybeard that reviews the AI slop of the junior engineers". In theory it sounds workable, but the volume of slop makes thoughtful review impossible. Seems like most orgs will just put pressure on the slop generators to do more and put pressure on the approvers and then scape goat the slop approvers if necessary?

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

#46

Post by ardeaver »

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…

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 of tests, and spend time reducing code complexity. The problem, I think, is people don't get promoted for preventing issues.

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

#47

Post by femiagbabiaka »

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…

the outcome of the review isn't just that the code gets shipped, it's knowledge transfer from the senior engineer to the junior engineers that then creates more senior engineers

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

#50

Post by locusofself »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #31
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…

Expert reviews are just about the only thing that makes AI generated code viable, though doing them after the fact is a bit sketchy, to be efficient you kinda need to keep an eye on what the model is doing as its working. Unchecked, AI models output code that is as buggy as it is inefficient. In smaller green field contexts, it's not so bad, but in a large code base, it's performs much worse as it will not have acces…

If you spend 5-15x the time reviewing what the LLM is doing, are you saving any time by using it?
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