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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

#81

Post by bs7280 »

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…

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 to try.

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

#82

Post by happytoexplain »

RamblingCTO wrote: post #37
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…

Who said PR reviews need to solve all the things and result in proof against idiots? So you're saying that peer reviews are a waste of time and only idiots would use/propose them?

None of that, sorry if I wasn't clear.

To partially clarify: "Idiot proof" is a broad concept that here refers specifically to abstraction layers, more or less (e.g. a UI framework is a little "idiot proof"; a WYSIWYG builder is more "idiot proof"). With AI, it's complicated, but bad leadership is over-interpreting the "idiot proof" aspects of it. It's a phrase, not an insult to users of these tools.

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

#83

Post by czscout »

bs7280 wrote: post #81
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…

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?

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

#84

Post by throwaw12 »

If Seniors are going to review every GenAI generated code, how do they keep up with the volume of changes?

So you have 2 systems of engineers: Sr- and Sr+

1. Both should write code to justify their work and impact

2. Sr- code must be reviewed by Sr+

What happens:

a. Sr+ output drops because review takes their time more and more

b. Sr+ just blindly accepts because of the volume is too high, and they should also do their own work

c. Sr+ asks Sr- to slow-down, then Sr- can get bad reviews for the output, because on average Sr+ will produce more code

I think (b) will happen

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

#85

Post by LogicFailsMe »

For the good of the company's future, all code should be reviewed by L10s going forward before they are accepted. They're the only ones with enough skin in the game to know what really matters after all.

And from their sagely reviews, we shall train a large language model to ultimately replace them because the most fungible thing at Amazon is the leadership.

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

#86

Post by skeeter2020 »

lokar wrote: post #54
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…

The goal of Sr code review is not to make the code better, it's to make the author better.

Agree but even broader: authors. I always viewed reviews as targeting Brook's less famous findings about the optimal team size being one, and asking how can we get better at building systems too big for the individual. I think code review is about shared, consistent understanding with catching bugs a nice side effect (or justification for the bean counters).

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

#87

Post by simplyluke »

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?

The bet from various industry leaders appears to be that the current generation of engineers will be the last who will ever need to think about complex systems and engineering, as the AI will just get good enough to do all of that by the time they retire.

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

#88

Post by skeeter2020 »

davidclark wrote: post #21
cobolcomesback wrote: post #11

This “mandatory meeting” is just the usual weekly company-wide meeting where recent operational issues are discussed. There was a big operational issue last week, so of course this week will have more attendance and discussion. This meeting happens literally every week, and has for years. Feels like the media is making a mountain out of a mole hill here.

The article claims: >He asked staff to attend the meeting, which is normally optional. Is that false? It also discusses a new policy: >Junior and mid-level engineers will now require more senior engineers to sign off any AI-assisted changes, Treadwell added. Is that inaccurate? It is good context that this is a regularly scheduled meeting. But, regularly scheduled meetings can have newsworthy things happen at them.

That's not really what the headline attempts to communicate though. It specifically emphasizes "Mandatory" and "AI breaking things". Nobody was going to click on "Regularly scheduled Amazon staff meeting will include discussion on operational improvement"

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

#89

Post by lokar »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #86
lokar wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The goal of Sr code review is not to make the code better, it's to make the author better.

Agree but even broader: authors. I always viewed reviews as targeting Brook's less famous findings about the optimal team size being one, and asking how can we get better at building systems too big for the individual. I think code review is about shared, consistent understanding with catching bugs a nice side effect (or justification for the bean counters).

I agree, made (mostly) that point in my top level comment. Code reviews (both in the normal GitHub flow, but also small meetings, design reviews, etc) all help to tie the team together and improve quality.

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

#90

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #31
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…

Expert reviews are just about the only thing that makes AI generated code viable, though doing them after the fact is a bit sketchy, to be efficient you kinda need to keep an eye on what the model is doing as its working. Unchecked, AI models output code that is as buggy as it is inefficient. In smaller green field contexts, it's not so bad, but in a large code base, it's performs much worse as it will not have acces…

In my experience, inefficient code is rarely the issue outside of data engineering type ETL jobs. It’s mostly architectural. Inefficient code isn’t the reason your login is taking 30 seconds. Yes I know at Amazon/AWS scale (former employee) every efficiency matters. But even at Salesforce scale, ringing out every bit of efficiency doesn’t matter.

No one cares about handcrafted artisanal code as long as it meets both functional and non functional requirements. The minute geeks get over themselves thinking they are some type of artists, the happier they will be.

I’ve had a job that requires coding for 30 years and before ther I was hobbyist and I’ve worked for from everything from 60 person startups to BigTech.

For my last two projects (consulting) and my current project, while I led the project, got the requirements, designed the architecture from an empty AWS account (yes using IAC) and delivered it. I didn’t look at a line of code. I verified the functional and non functional requirements, wrote the hand off documentation etc.

The customer is happy, my company is happy, and I bet you not a single person will ever look at a line of code I wrote. If they do get a developer to take it over, the developer will be grateful for my detailed AGENTS.md file.

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