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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

#441

Post by rixed »

sarchertech wrote: post #189
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats easy enough to prevent with modular code that’s what “plan mode” is for. But you probably never worked with a bunch of C# developers using R#

1. Preventing agents from crossing boundaries, creating implicit and explicit dependencies, and building false layers requires much more human control over every PR and involvement with the code than you seem to espouse. 2. Assuming that techniques that work with human developers that have severely impaired judgement but are massively faster at producing code is a bad idea. 3. There’s no way you have enough experienc…

I solve this issue (agent looking at too much and changing too much) with the best abstraction ever invented : files and permissions.

One task is usually composed of 2 input files, a specification and a header file, and the task is to output the implementation and nothing more. Agent user has no other permissions in the file system, has no tools, just output the code that's directed into a file. I run ´make' whenever I update a specification. Token count is minimal.

Do I save time? Not much, but having to specify and argue about everything is interesting, and I trust myself that I'm not loosing any knowledge this way; be it the why or the how.

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

#442

Post by qxxx »

so, seniors will review now the AI slop code.. I am also doing this task and reviewing this kind of code takes time as the code is often overengineered. Code works but will have potential bugs. I am not able to find every bug or implication quickly. But I am also using ai to review the ai slop lol, because why now. After that I am also quickly reviewing by myself.

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

#443

Post by senderista »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #298
daxfohl wrote: post #287

You could create an agent template for each incident you've ever had, with context pre-cached with the postmortem report, full code change, and any other information about the incident. Then for every new PR you could clone agents from all those templates and ask whether the PR could cause something similar to the pre-loaded incident. If any of them say yes, reject the PR unless there's a manual override. You'd never…

You vastly underestimate the complexity of systems in a company like Amazon. COEs and Operation Readiness Reviews are already the documents that you mention, but they are largely useless in preventing incidents.

Actually CoEs would make an amazing training corpus for code reviews.

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

#444

Post by rahbert »

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.

This is correct. We ran them on Wednesday’s in Alexa. Jessy actually used to come and sit in ours once a quarter or so when he was running AWS.

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

#445

Post by helsinkiandrew »

MikeTheGreat wrote: post #301
djb_hackernews wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When an SVP asks you to do something in a mass email, it's very much optional. Dave Treadwell is an SVP, his org is likely in the 10's of thousands, there is no way to even have a mandatory meeting for that many people. My SVP asks me to do things all the time, indirectly. I do probably 5% of them.

> org is likely in the 10's of thousands, there is no way to even have a mandatory meeting for that many people. Ok, this is pretty off-topic, but is this still true? I get that you can't have 10K people all actively participate in the meeting at the same time, but doesn't Zoom have a feature where you can broadcast to thousands and thousands? Doesn't X/Twitter have a feature like this? (Although, to be fair, the las…

> but doesn't Zoom have a feature where you can broadcast to thousands and thousands?

They have webinar/event support for 5000+ participants, viewers can raise hands/use chat feedback for questions etc. and the meeting host can invite people to be visible.

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

#446

Post by rhubarbtree »

bandrami wrote: post #426
rhubarbtree wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They are already at this point - they just think the world needs to catch up. They don’t review the code most of the time. They believe it’s just a matter of becoming comfortable with the idea you don’t write code. Seems plenty of startups in SV are also doing this.

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

#447

Post by [deleted] »

mmcconnell1618 wrote: post #370
rco8786 wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going to systemically turn off your senior staff over time also. Most Senior Engineers aren't that interested in doing even more code review.

Also, have massive layoffs every few months just to keep people on edge. AWS wants people to leave with RTO and badging policies, comp range shifts lower unless you have year over year ratings, and an obsessive push to force AI into every process. Top talent is leaving and will continue to leave AWS.

[deleted]

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

#448

Post by bandrami »

rhubarbtree wrote: post #446
bandrami wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They are already at this point - they just think the world needs to catch up. They don’t review the code most of the time. They believe it’s just a matter of becoming comfortable with the idea you don’t write code. Seems plenty of startups in SV are also doing this.

Like the fake facebook that had a security hole so severe every single participant had their API keys exposed?

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

#449

Post by rafaelmn »

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…

Eventually they'll get rid of juniors and mid level devs because realistically it's easier to review when you're the one doing the prompting.

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

#450

Post by rafaelmn »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #199
tmaly wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long will that 19% hold as models grow in capability?

I'm a bit tired of waiting for "tomorrow", so I'll just live in today's world. We'll burn that bridge when we get to it.

The study you quoted is sonnet 3.5/3.7 era. You could see the promise with those models but the agentic/task performance of Opus 4.5/4.6 makes a huge difference - the models are pretty amazing at building context from a mid size codebase at this point.
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