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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

#451

Post by strogonoff »

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…

I would argue that the amount of time needed for a proper review exceeds the amount of time needed to just do it yourself.

When reviewing, you need to go through every step of implementing it yourself (understand the problem, solve the problem, etc.), but you additionally need to 1) understand someone else’s solution and 2) diff your solution against theirs to provide meaningful feedback.

Review could take roughly equivalent time, but only if I am allowed to reject/approve in a binary way (“my solution would not be the same, therefore denied”) which is not considered appropriate in most places.

This is why I am not a fan of being the reviewer.

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

#452

Post by wiseowise »

ardeaver wrote: post #46
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…

> 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

This bs is what I say my juniors when I want them to fuck off with their reviews and focus on my actual work.

Sounds very insightful though.

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

#453

Post by wiseowise »

8note wrote: post #361
devonbleak wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're actually going to see is seniors inundated by slop and burning out and quitting because what used to be enjoyable solving of problems has become wading through slop that took 10 minutes to generate and submit but 30+ minutes to understand and write up a critique for it.

not even that. implementing this requirement could be a general work stoppage whenever the senior engineer is in all day meetings or on vacation With a layout of 4 juniors, 5 intermediates, and 0-1 senior per team, putting all the changes through senior engineer review means you mostly wont be able to get CRs approved. I guess it could result in forcing everyone who's sandbagging as intermediate instead of going to s…

What vacation? Didn’t you hear we unlocked unlimited productivity?

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

#454

Post by wiseowise »

lovich wrote: post #280
bluefirebrand wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we’re doing the industrial equivalent of eating our seed corn and there is seemingly no will to slow that trend down, much less reverse it. I know I'm probably coming across as a lunatic lately on HN but I really do think we're on the path towards violence thanks to AI You just cannot destroy this many people's livelihoods without backlash. It's leading nowhere good But a handful of people are getting stupidly rich…

I don't think you're a lunatic. If you look at the luddite rebellion they weren't actually against industrial technology like looms. They were against being told they weren't needed anymore and thrown to the wolves because of the machines. The rich have forgotten they are made of meat and/or are planning on returning to feudalism ala Yarvin, Thiel, Musk, and co's politics.

> The rich have forgotten they are made of meat and/or are planning on returning to feudalism ala Yarvin, Thiel, Musk, and co's politics.

What are you realistically willing to do? How far can you go?

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

#455

Post by wiseowise »

petterroea wrote: post #424

I 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 mor…

> Mentoring Juniors is an important part of the job and crucial service to the industry

Not really.

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

#456

Post by wiseowise »

gdulli wrote: post #64
dragonelite wrote: post #24

Expect a shitload of AI powered code review products the next 18 months.

"Why don't they just make the plane out of the black box?"

“You wouldn’t write a code by hand, would you?”

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

#457

Post by wiseowise »

fredgrott wrote: post #114

Curious question, how many Amazon Engineers flunk basic CS? If you know CS you know two things: 1. AI can not judge code either noise or signal, AI cannot tell. 2. CS-wise we use statistic analysis to judge good code from bad. How much time does it take to take AI output and run the basic statistic tools for most computer languages? Some juniors need firing outright

“Haha, sure man. CSI, great tv series. Look, just review Jeff’s PR and move that button down, okay? Have a tennis lesson, kbye”

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

#458

Post by rhubarbtree »

bandrami wrote: post #448
rhubarbtree wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yep, that’s the most prominent example of a system built without code review I can also reach for. Whether all such systems also suffer critical flaws is another question entirely. And whether that matters is a further unknown.

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

#459

Post by rhubarbtree »

bandrami wrote: post #427
rhubarbtree wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I’m not sure I follow, but I don’t hear anyone asking those questions of the bad software we already have today.

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

#460

Post by kavalg »

devonbleak wrote: post #100
jetrink wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could create the right sort of incentives though. If I'm a junior and I suddenly have to take my work to a senior every time I use AI, I'm going to be much more selective about how I use it and much more careful when I do use it. AI is dangerous because it is so frictionless and this is a way to add friction. Maybe I don't have the correct mental model for how the typical junior engineer thinks though. I never wan…

What you're actually going to see is seniors inundated by slop and burning out and quitting because what used to be enjoyable solving of problems has become wading through slop that took 10 minutes to generate and submit but 30+ minutes to understand and write up a critique for it.

30+ minutes is a gross underestimation IMHO. It is probably somewhere in the range 1:10, 10:100, especially if you include the cost of context switches a senior has to do. In my experience, the loss of flow, due to context switch is very prominent and sometimes painful.
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