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

Post by bloppe » Thu, Mar 12, 2026, 4:35 PM UTC

brianwawok wrote: post #338

bloppe wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think of code review more about ensuring understandability. When you spend hours gathering context, designing, iterating, debugging, and finally polishing a commit, your ability to judge the readability of your own change has been tainted by your intimate familiarity with it. Getting a fresh pair of eyes to read it and leave comments like "why did you do it this way" or "please refactor to use XYZ for maintainabili…

Alternately, have a small team where you trust everyone.

Post by unselect5917 » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 4:55 AM UTC

interestpiqued wrote: post #492

mrguyorama wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Post by tech_tuna » Fri, Mar 13, 2026, 12:52 PM UTC

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.…

Post by FromTheFirstIn » Sun, Mar 15, 2026, 7:26 PM UTC

FromTheFirstIn wrote: post #506

tech_tuna wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At a shitty company. The problem is - you cannot ship a large amount of code quickly in a perfect way. Positioning the problem as "what's the point of generating all this code so fast if I still need a warm body at the end making sure it's OK?" is hilarious. Don't do that. Just ship it. Yes, good tests, linting, etc will help but if you really believe you don't need humans in the loop at all, at least for the time be…

Edit- I disagree with you, didn’t realize you weren’t Op

Post by montymaty » Tue, Mar 17, 2026, 2:22 AM UTC

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…