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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

#431

Post by the_arun »

davidclark wrote: post #21
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.

The article claims: >He asked staff to attend the meeting, which is normally optional. Is that false? It also discusses a new policy: >Junior and mid-level engineers will now require more senior engineers to sign off any AI-assisted changes, Treadwell added. Is that inaccurate? It is good context that this is a regularly scheduled meeting. But, regularly scheduled meetings can have newsworthy things happen at them.

Days are not far, where my agents are going to attend meetings & share my opinions, collect summary for me. If everyone do same - agents run meetings & share summary with parent (humans). Each of us have LLMs/Agents with our contextual data. It is another level of multi tasking.

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

#432

Post by unselect5917 »

interestpiqued wrote: post #321
ansibsha wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You’re missing the point of a spec

The spec is as much for humans as it is the machine, yes?

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

#433

Post by PessimalDecimal »

tcbrah wrote: post #148

the funniest part is amazon literally started tying AI usage to performance reviews like 6 months ago and now theyre doing damage control. you cant simultaneously pressure every engineer to use more AI AND be shocked when AI-assisted code breaks prod. pick one lol

Why can't they?

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

#434

Post by PessimalDecimal »

8note wrote: post #386
Insanity wrote: post #75

It's only going to get worse with the brain drain as a result of the layoffs. Which will increase the use of AI assisted coding and increase the number of outages related to this. Imagine having to debug code that caused an outage when 80% is written by an LLM and you now have to start actually figuring out the codebase at 2am.. :)

but thats what it was like when i started at amazon in 2016? i think the team i was on was a bit of an outlier in terms of owning 40 dumptser fires at once, and the first time reading any one of them was at 2AM because it was down. having an LLM give early passes on reading the godawful c++ code that you can tell at a glance that its not gonna work as expected, but you cant tell why, or what expected actually is woul…

That's what it was like when you started out, but did you eventually learn that code? Imagine constantly getting out back into square one on understanding a legacy code base you just inherited, forever. This is what it's be like with constant LLM-induced churn on code repositories.

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

#435

Post by interestpiqued »

unselect5917 wrote: post #432
interestpiqued wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re missing the point of a spec

The spec is as much for humans as it is the machine, yes?

Spec should be made before hand and agreed on by stakeholders. It says what it should do. So it’s for whoever is implementing, modifying, and/or testing the code. And unfortunately devs have a tendency of poor documentation

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

#436

Post by xp84 »

the_arun wrote: post #431
davidclark wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article claims: >He asked staff to attend the meeting, which is normally optional. Is that false? It also discusses a new policy: >Junior and mid-level engineers will now require more senior engineers to sign off any AI-assisted changes, Treadwell added. Is that inaccurate? It is good context that this is a regularly scheduled meeting. But, regularly scheduled meetings can have newsworthy things happen at them.

Days are not far, where my agents are going to attend meetings & share my opinions, collect summary for me. If everyone do same - agents run meetings & share summary with parent (humans). Each of us have LLMs/Agents with our contextual data. It is another level of multi tasking.

Then I spin up another agent to listen to the agent who went to the meeting and make any necessary adjustments to the output of my coding agents based on the new rules it heard about from the meeting agent.

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

#437

Post by mock-possum »

ceejayoz wrote: post #202
skeeter2020 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not really what the headline attempts to communicate though. It specifically emphasizes "Mandatory" and "AI breaking things". Nobody was going to click on "Regularly scheduled Amazon staff meeting will include discussion on operational improvement"

> He asked staff to attend the meeting, which is normally optional. If I get a note from my boss like that, I consider it mandatory.

Yeah I don’t understand why people are pretending not to understand this -

> He asked staff to attend the meeting, which is normally optional.

Clearly means that while normally the meeting would be optional, this time it’s not

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

#438

Post by xp84 »

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.

Sure, but if you define the code as the only spec, then it is usually a terrible spec, since the code itself specifies bugs too. And one of the benefits of having a spec (or tests) is that you have something against which to evaluate the program in order to decide if its behavior is correct or not.

Incidentally, I think in many scenarios, LLMs are pretty great at converting code to a spec and indeed spec to code (of equal quality to that of the input spec).

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

#439

Post by saghm »

shermantanktop wrote: post #420
thepasch wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the headline deliberately tries to blow this up into a big deal I do not understand how “company that runs half the internet has had major recent outages and now explicitly names lax/non-existent LLM usage guidelines as a major reason” can possibly not be a big deal in the midst of an industry-wide hype wave over how the world’s biggest companies now run agent teams shipping 150 pull requests an hour. The chain of…

The subject of the media coverage is not AWS, it is a peer organization to AWS that runs using significant amounts of non-AWS infrastructure. They are both part of an umbrella called Amazon but are not at all the same thing. Maybe your CoT-level reasoning isn’t so robust.

It's hard to that this objection seriously. The publication is literally called the Financial Times. It's not exactly crazy for them to think that their readers might care about the entity that shows up the stock ticker rather than how the company happens to divide up things internally.

Even if it weren't a finance publication, I have trouble imagining you making this argument if a headline said something like "Google deals with outages in the cloud" because of the idea that it's misleading to refer to it as anything other than GCP. I think you're fundamentally not understanding how people communicate about this sort of thing if you actually think that someone saying "Amazon" is misleading in any meaningful way.

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

#440

Post by intelkishan »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #187
rectang wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not my experience — I'm significantly faster while guiding an LLM using this methodology. The gains are especially notable when working in unfamiliar domains. I can glance over code and know "if this compiles and the tests succeed, it will work", even if I didn't have the knowledge to write it myself.

> I'm significantly faster while guiding an LLM using this methodology. https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o... >When developers are allowed to use AI tools, they take 19% longer to complete issues—a significant slowdown that goes against developer beliefs and expert forecasts. This gap between perception and reality is striking: developers expected AI to speed them up by 24%, and even after e…

There's a new report from the same group which shows that the degree of slowdown has reduced. Link: https://metr.org/blog/2026-02-24-uplift-update/
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