Mastodawn

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

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Flipper 🐬🏳️‍🌈Mar 10

@cwebber @KimPerales

This lines up with what I'm seeing. Very experienced engineers who are used to overseeing junior engineers are making these tools work well for them. Junior and most mid-level engineers are making a mess with these tools.

The problem is that junior engineers don't become senior engineers through AI coding. So this move by Amazon is dumb: they are making the only people who can use the tools not use them and simply review the mess instead.

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Grovewest Mar 10

@flipper @cwebber @KimPerales I was a senior engineer and I always insisted my own code was actually reviewed not just rubber stamped. I was typically called in after the disaster happened, not for a review before, so it was to my advantage. That said if AI is to replace programmers it will not need to generate code. What is the point of generating code humans can read if no humans are going to read it? (1/2)

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Grovewest

AI would simply produce safe, highly efficient executables and scripts in machine language. It would make the environment changes needed to accommodate and deploy those. The idea that AI will suddenly replace human engineers is absurd hype. (2/2)