So Amazon senior SWEs now have to review every single PR for all intents and purposes? I didn't think Amazon could get worse.
After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes
421–430 of 510 posts
Re: After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes
#422Earlier 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…
One of the major things code review does is prevent that one guy on your team who is sloppy or incompetent from messing up the codebase without singling him out. If you told someone "I don't trust you, run all code by me first" it wouldn't go well. If you tell them "everyone's code gets reviewed" they're ok with it.
Everyone is sloppy sometimes. I wonder if what code review does is prevent velocity (acts a a brake) so that things dont change too fast (which is often a good thing).
You don't get paid for features or code shipped. People don't pay $200 a head for fine dining based on the number of carrot chops or garlic crushes. The chops and crushes are necessary but not what you should be optimizing for.
Re: After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes
#423Such fun.
On top of your already strapped schedule, now you have to bet your career on vibe code that you will now have to spend time reading and debugging. All that instead of a chain of accountability that has people in place instead of stupid bots with fake agency.
This is beyond corporate satire.
There was never before a technology capable of convincing leadership of its usefulness despite its constant blunders and despite the low quality of its output. This feels like a corporate mass delusion of unprecedented scale.
Re: After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes
#424I feel bad for the seniors who have to take on this workload. The general pattern I am seeing is that seniors at "AI-first" companies are being held back from doing their work by reviewing junior PRs, who are now able to ship much more code they don't understand the badness of.
Mentoring Juniors is an important part of the job and crucial service to the industry, but juniors equipped with LLMs make the deal a bit more sour. Anecdotally, they don't really remember the feedback as well, because they weren't involved in writing the code. Its burnout-inducing to see your hard work and feedback go in one ear and out another.
I personally know people looking to jump ship because they waste too much time at their current employer on this.
Re: After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes
#425The way we used to build confidence in what we shipped was by beating our head against it for a week figuring it all out. You really can't have the same confidence with code reviews unless you basically do the same work you'd do to write it by hand for a lot of these things.
Re: After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes
#426Reviewing AI generated code at PR time is a bottleneck. It cancels most of the benefits senior leadership thinks AI offers (delivery speed). There’s also this implicit imbalance engineers typically don’t like: it takes me 10 min to submit a complete feature thanks to Claude… but for the human reviewing my PR in a manual way it will take them 10-20 times that. Edit: at the end real engineers know that what takes effor…
Most AI advocates I know believe this period, reviewing every line of code, will come to an end when models improve. So there will be no bottleneck. We will simply test and ship, with AI doing all the code and review.
Possibly, but it doesn't make sense to restructure things in advance of that actually happening, particularly since there's no roadmap for getting there right now.
Re: After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes
#427What are we going to do about software for critical infrastructure in the coming decade? Feels inevitable that code for aviation will slowly rot from the same forces at play but with lethal results.
It will be written much the same as now, but using AI to improve quality through code inspection etc. Just because nearly all software is going to be written by AI, does not mean critical infrastructure will be.
At some point people are going to start asking why software that doesn't need to be right should exist in the first place
Re: After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes
#428AI seems to be the whipping boy, but to me, it really seems more of a symptom than a cause. At its root, isn't this an issue of a decline in critical thinking?
I do think AI adoption exacerbates said falloff.
Re: After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes
#429In case it isn’t completely obvious from this, it is indeed hellish to work there. Most of AWS has a 2 reviewer requirement. If AI is writing most of the code (and it is because most Amazon code is copypasta boilerplate) you need 3 developers to sign off to ship anything. But of course due to headcount attrition, managers have ~1.5 developers to a project. Meanwhile the L8 manager is doing nothing except stack rankin…
The thing is, this management philosophy worked when AWS knew what they needed to build and just needed to execute with top notch operations.
But now with AI, they are getting disrupted. Most AWS services might become obsolete, why does an ai need these janky higher levels abstractions AWS piles on.
So now they need innovation, but the company isn’t set up for it. They are forcing short deadlines for product launches that don’t matter
Re: After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes
#430Earlier quoted context omitted.
But aren’t companies enforcing AI usage? If noy, wait for it
Mine's tracking it complete with a leaderboard (LOL) and it's been suggested to me that it'd be in my best interest not to be too low on that list, so I suspect in the back half of the year some sterner conversations and/or pink-slips are going to be coming the way of those who've not caught on that they need to at least be sending some make-work crap to their LLMs every day, even if they immediately throw the output…
Vibe code a side project at work. I’m willing to bet the tools aren’t mapping the code contribution locations to business impact (hard problem).