Christine Lemmer-WebberMar 10

It turns out GenAI code changes are causing serious incidents and outages at Amazon with "high blast radius" https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/03/after-outages-amazon-to-make-senior-engineers-sign-off-on-ai-assisted-changes/

Junior / middle engineers no longer allowed to push GenAI code to production without senior engineer review

(HT @KimPerales )

EDIT: Better link above than before. Old one is here:
https://www.ft.com/content/7cab4ec7-4712-4137-b602-119a44f771de

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

AWS has suffered at least two incidents linked to the use of AI coding assistants.

Ars Technica
Show threadCharles U. Farley
@cwebber Did they seriously think using AI meant that they could just skip code review?
Mar 10 at 2:31pmWeb
Show threadT Alex BeamishMar 10

@freakazoid @cwebber This. Getting an AI to write your code is equivalent to a) an insanely over-confident intern or b) a seasoned developer has gotten heavily into the psychedelics. Both choices are questionable, both need serious code review.

And in the end, are you really ahead?

Show threadKwaze KwazeMar 10
@talexb Just not reviewing anything (read: glancing and saying "looks good") is how any of these people are able to say with a straight face this stuff makes them faster.
Show threadPhil Burg (he/him)Mar 10

@kwazekwaze @talexb I listened to a podcast guest two weeks ago who was very pleased to say his company now does exactly that.

"We weren't doing real code reviews before, and now all our code is written by Claude our QA team can't keep up - so I let them all go" or words to that effect.

I'm sure it'll turn out well for their customers.

Show threadT Alex BeamishMar 11

@Standard_Phil @kwazekwaze

Oh .. my goodness. There are so many ways that this could end badly for this company.

And letting all of QA go? That's the last line of defense for a software company. Crazy.

Show threadPhil Burg (he/him)Mar 11
@talexb @kwazekwaze I don't often find myself yelling at the car stereo when I'm listening to a podcast, but on this occasion I had some things to say (nobody was there to benefit from my insight, sadly)
Show threadCharles U. FarleyMar 10
@talexb As someone with ADHD who frequently stalls out any time work gets tedious, yes, I'm definitely ahead. Would love to be able to work on stuff that's always so fun I don't stall out on it, but sadly I need to actually get paid so I can keep my family fed, clothed, and housed.
Show threadT Alex BeamishMar 10
@freakazoid Delighted to hear that it works for you - I'm just commenting that it's imperative to check work produced by an AI.
Show threadRussellMar 10

@freakazoid It sounded like the change is to requiring multiple senior reviews instead of just one. There's so much pressure on and chaos in the process that the only way to seem remotely productive is "LGTM 🤞".

They probably are using LLM agents to supplement the review process itself (they were at my now previous place, and people who can override human review required checks have started doing so). So, AI creates, AI reviews, and a human (gotta have a scape goat) clicks "merge".

Show threadCharles U. FarleyMar 10
@zimzat Yeah, I'm definitely seeing the pressure. AI -> more review requests + more pressure to be productive -> rubber stamps. We're in a world where reviewing a PR now often takes longer than writing it. And of course it's the person who wrote it who gets the credit. Which is going to need to change; in AI-world, author and reviewer should really get equal credit.
Show threadCharles U. FarleyMar 11
@zimzat Oh, also, in my experience, AI is worthless for review of AI-generated code; it will only catch the same things that it would have caught had the PR author used the review agent themselves, which will in turn be using the PR description the agent probably wrote, and thus will miss the same sort of mistakes the agent would have made to begin with. The result is that if the author is doing the bare minimum that they should be, the review agent won't find any issues.