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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

#461

Post by kqr »

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…

Code review is great for spreading context, but they also are very good at finding bugs. If you want to find bugs, review is one of the best ways to do it. https://entropicthoughts.com/code-reviews-do-find-bugs

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

#462

Post by kavalg »

czscout wrote: post #83
bs7280 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also why I think we will enter a world without Jr's. The time it takes for a Senior to review the Jr's AI code is more expensive than if the Sr produced their own AI code from scratch. Factor in the lack of meetings from a Sr only team, and the productivity gains will appear to be massive. Whether or not these productivity gains are realized is another question, but spreadsheet based decision makers are going…

In this scenario, how might one become a senior without first being a junior? Seniors just pop into existence?

Apprenticeship. You will have to prove to the company that working at a minimal wage is still beneficial. Or we can take it even further, you will have to pay the company for getting the necessary experience. Maybe you sign a 5 year contract with a big cancellation fee. It is not unheard of. I remember some of the navy schools having something like this. You study for 5 years for free (bed and food are paid by the school) and then you have to work for at least 5 years for the navy or pay a very big fine if you refuse to do so.

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

#463

Post by [deleted] »

rhubarbtree wrote: post #459
bandrami wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#464

Post by jamiemallers »

hrmtst93837 wrote: post #237
AlexeyBrin wrote: post #4

I wonder how this will work in practice. Say I'm a senior engineer and I produce myself thousands of lines of code per day with the help of LLMs as mandated by the company. I still need to presumably read and test the code that I push to production. When will I have time to read and evaluate similar amounts of code produced by a junior or a mid level engineer ?

[flagged]

[dead]

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

#465

Post by fireant »

therealdrag0 wrote: post #414
Tyr42 wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heck, doing a self review when you wrote the code catches stuff like forgetting debug prints.

Self review should also include adding guiding comments for other reviewers.

Do you add these into the code or into the review itself? I sometimes write these into the review, but I wonder if it's a useful information that should actually be inside the code that will get lost when the PR is merged

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

#466

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

rafaelmn wrote: post #450
johnnyanmac wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google's latest research shows AI coding increases speed by 3% while also increasing bugs by 9%. (I.e., a net negative.)

AI doesn't make you code faster, it just makes the boring stretches somewhat more exciting.

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

#467

Post by lionkor »

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…

> [...] requires an amount of time approaching the time spent if they had just done it themselves.

Yes, but with the caveat that the junior learns and eventually can become the senior.

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

#468

Post by getly_store »

icedchai wrote: post #293
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My last project was basically an ETL implementation on AWS starting with an empty AWS account and a internal web admin site that had 10 pages. I am yada yada yadaing over a little bit. What I checked. 1. The bash shell scripts I had it write as my integration test suite 2. To make sure it wasn’t loading the files into Postgres the naive way -loading the file from S3 and doing bulk inserts instead of using the AWS ext…

This all makes sense. I've witnessed human developers produce incredibly convoluted, slow "ETL pipelines" that took 10+ minutes to load single digit megabytes of data. It could've been reduced to a shell script that called psql \copy.

Yep. Heavy ETL often adds latency; a staging table plus COPY into Postgres, then idempotent upserts, is usually enough. Keep it incremental and observable: checksums, counts, and replayable loads. For bigger scales, add CDC (logical decoding like Debezium) and parallelize ingestion across partitions; minimize in-Python transforms and push work into SQL.

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

#469

Post by embedding-shape »

ex-aws-dude wrote: post #266
embedding-shape wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2. Having Less comments on their PRs: for some drastically dumb reason, having a PR thoroughly reviewed I'm very far away from liking Amazon's engineering culture and general work culture, but having PRs with countless of discussions and feedback on it does signal that you've done a lot of work without collaborating with others before doing the work. Generally in teams that work well together and build great softwa…

Eh I feel like there are some features where you just have to get in the weeds to even design it and the code review itself is part of the process of designing/figuring out the edge cases.

> Eh I feel like there are some features where you just have to get in the weeds to even design it and the code review

I agree, but those are separate tasks completely (in my view) compared to "Someone writes code that goes into production", usually called "spikes" or something else to differentiate them from "normal" tasks. They're quite literally just about exploration and figuring out the design, before the "real" work starts.

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

#470

Post by sarchertech »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #401
sarchertech wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow you have completely lost the plot. It’s like you’re a bot that’s mixing up who he’s replying to.

Just maybe you aren’t making the strong argument you think you are making

I wouldn’t know sir, because you didn’t address a single lick of it. You went off and argued with some other argument you constructed in your head. I believe we have a name for that. It is an awfully good way to win arguments in your own mind and retain unshakable confidence in your position if that’s your goal though.
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