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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

#491

Post by cvak »

philip1209 wrote: post #249

I think the deeper need is a "self-review" flow. People push AI-reviewed code like they wrote it. In the past, "wrote it" implies "reviewed it." With AI, that's no longer true. I advocate for GitHub and other code review systems to add a "Require self-review" option, where people must attest that they reviewed and approved their own code. This change might seem symbolic, but it clearly sets workflows and expectations…

TBH, I do PRs on repos with no other devs just do do self-review, and I did that before AI.

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

#492

Post by interestpiqued »

mrguyorama wrote: post #481
interestpiqued wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Software development is only 70ish years old and somehow we have already forgotten the very very first thing we learned. "Just get bulletproof specs that everyone agrees on" is why waterfall style software development doesn't work. Now suddenly that LLMs are doing the coding, everyone believes that changes?

I’m confused, are you saying that making a design plan and high level spec before hand doesn’t work?

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

#493

Post by therealdrag0 »

fireant wrote: post #465
therealdrag0 wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Into the review is what I’m talking about. The diff is often a scattered collection of files missing context, and may have refactors that obscure behavioral changes.

So there is reason to add comments that address a different readers understanding than the code rest.

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

#494

Post by 33MHz-i486 »

malfist wrote: post #371
znpy wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Create conflicting metrics for performance, push credit up and responsibility down, punish everyone below you for not meeting the double standards This resonates with my experience. The only thing you forgot is that you can also use the 12^H^H 14 leadership principles to argue whatever you want (and then the opposite of what you argued last month, still using the same leadership principles).

Got a project finished early? Well, you didn't insist on the highest standards. Made sure things were held to a high standard? Well, you weren't biased for action. Were you a knowledge source for the entire team? Well, you weren't learning and being curious. Did you ask a lot of questions to learn everything? Well, then you weren't "are right a lot". Did you think big and come up with an architecture that saved Amazo…

the key is to understand which LPs apply to your L+1 and which apply to you (hint: its not the fun ones)

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

#495

Post by idiotsecant »

brewdad wrote: post #296
idiotsecant wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it gets less mandatory the more layers up you go. If I get an email from an SVP that is CC: the entire division saying everyone should go to a meeting I will almost certainly be able to ascertain the contents of that meeting in 10 seconds from someone else who did attend

Surely your boss notices your non-attendance.

The bosses function is to shield you from random time wasting junk. Either you haven't had to survive in a borg corporate environment or you have and you had a bad boss for it.

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

#496

Post by shermantanktop »

saghm wrote: post #439
shermantanktop wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "Googl…

You’re describing reasonable misunderstandings, but they are still misunderstandings.

The cause and effect statements just don’t correspond to reality.

I guess I’m stuck on the idea that the actual facts are relevant. If the question instead is how the dance of optics and PR is going in the minds of people who don’t know enough to doubt what they read, I don’t know what to say about that.

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

#497

Post by proxyscore »

malfist wrote: post #371
znpy wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Create conflicting metrics for performance, push credit up and responsibility down, punish everyone below you for not meeting the double standards This resonates with my experience. The only thing you forgot is that you can also use the 12^H^H 14 leadership principles to argue whatever you want (and then the opposite of what you argued last month, still using the same leadership principles).

Got a project finished early? Well, you didn't insist on the highest standards. Made sure things were held to a high standard? Well, you weren't biased for action. Were you a knowledge source for the entire team? Well, you weren't learning and being curious. Did you ask a lot of questions to learn everything? Well, then you weren't "are right a lot". Did you think big and come up with an architecture that saved Amazo…

I have always received my accolade and never seen that twisted in that way there, though. But that was during covid. And in Europe.

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

#499

Post by happymellon »

hnguyen1412 wrote: post #408
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.

are you saying SVP’s words are not important and should be ignored? This is not what I remember back in the day when Bezos sent his email with a question mark (or maybe !)

> are you saying SVP’s words are not important and should be ignored?

Personally I would say that an SVPs words are not important and don't need to be ignored.

It's like a politician talking about abstract policies. Yes they do sort of affect me, but they don't require any affirmative action on my behalf any more than the wind does.

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

#500

Post by FromTheFirstIn »

hard24 wrote: post #80
sdevonoes wrote: post #57

Reviewing AI generated code at PR time is a bottleneck. It cancels most of the benefits senior leadership thinks AI offers (delivery speed). There’s also this implicit imbalance engineers typically don’t like: it takes me 10 min to submit a complete feature thanks to Claude… but for the human reviewing my PR in a manual way it will take them 10-20 times that. Edit: at the end real engineers know that what takes effor…

Indeed. My view as a CEO is, if you are still reviewing the code yourself then what use is it that you can produce a bunch of text at a faster rate? I'd prefer people wrote good quality code and checked it as they went along... whilst allowing room for other stuff they didn't think of to come to the front. The production process of using LLMs is entirely different, in its current state I don't see the net benefit. E.…

Where are you CEO?
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