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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

#471

Post by [deleted] »

8note wrote: post #376
fmajid wrote: post #284

If they do not also increase the senior devs’ allotted time for code reviews to make up for the increased volume of changes due to increased productivity of the junior to mid level devs, or hire more seniors, this will just lead to burnout (on top of Amazon’s already high levels) and scapegoating seniors for having waved through a change because they materially can’t review them fast enough.

Id maybe consider spinning out a different job role for like "review engineer" who's not busy making strategic decisions and near term planning, just making sure the code is actually good still within the engineering IC role, but on a different track

[deleted]

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

#472

Post by rk06 »

prakhar897 wrote: post #128

From the amazon I know, people only care about a. not getting fired and b. promotions. For devs, the matrix looks like this: 1. Shipping: deliver tickets or be pipped. 2. Having Less comments on their PRs: for some drastically dumb reason, having a PR thoroughly reviewed is a sign of bad quality. L7 and above use this metric to Pip folks. 3. Docs: write docs, get them reviewed to show you're high level. Without AI, a…

if someone responded with a lot of PR comments, I would set up a meeting directly and avoid unnecessary discussion on PR.

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

#473

Post by franktankbank »

mentos wrote: post #265

What 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.

Cabin in the woods.

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

#474

Post by Throwaay19832 »

hyperpape wrote: post #358
wolvoleo wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I've ever heard a top leader say anything essential in such a meeting. The stuff they work on is not related to my job at all. It's all gartner level strategy stuff. In our company they do take time talking about it in large calls but it's always boring and never relevant. And a lot of political spin you have to poke through to see the real message. If I ever attend it just put it on mute and look at th…

Most of those meetings are pretty damn fluffy. No one goes back to their desk and does anything different because they've introduced new company values and the acronym is S.M.I.L.E. But this meeting is a course correction for how they're using AI, which is a huge initiative. He'll be trying to sell the right balance of "keep using the technology, but don't fuck anything up." Too cautious, everyone freezes and there's…

Lol this reads like some transcript from the court of an ancient Roman Emperor.

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

#475

Post by Shocka1 »

xp84 wrote: post #436
the_arun wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My agent will just be full AGI. It’ll invent time travel and go back to attend all my meetings 100x faster.

Meanwhile the normie “Claw/OpenBot” agents can stay in the present grinding 24/7, while mine recursively spawns across alternate timelines and handles my work at ~1e9x parallelism.

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

#476

Post by icedchai »

getly_store wrote: post #468
icedchai wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yep, that's the pattern I follow.

Unfortunately, the "ETL pipeline" I mentioned didn't even use transactions and was opening a new connection for every insert. No wonder it was slow.

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

#477

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

sarchertech wrote: post #470
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Again exactly what argument are you making then? Maybe you should spend more time being clear about your argument? An LLM might help…

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

#479

Post by 33MHz-i486 »

mikert89 wrote: post #429
33MHz-i486 wrote: post #419

In 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…

its not even AI. most of the cloud offerings are commodities now.

the marginal technological direction is determined by middle managers whoes primary motivation is “what new customer facing feature can I launch at this years re:invent and build a little empire” (of course this is a shrinking offering as tech debt and complexity pile up)

junior engineers are burned and churned on execution, seniors are project managers, principals just do high level reviews & high level fire fighting (note not actually leading the tech)

director and above just their spend time on “what to kill” or “who to fire” as priorities change every 6 months

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

#480

Post by mancerayder »

Is the rebuttal posted anywhere? I collapsed the huge first few threads but nothing is there. True or false, Amazon are saying it's not true that it's due to AI, and in fact their change in operational processes to add review is broader:

https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/aws/aws-service-outage-ai-b...

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