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

@cwebber @KimPerales

Imagine being a senior engineer and half your day is just spent reviewing slop code, we may really be in hell already

@Purple
It's me, I am that senior engineer! I often see the most mishaps occur with junior devs that haven't learned enough to understand the codebase pushing code that they don't understand. And then when asked for justification for why they approached something a certain way, I get mixed responses and reverts.

Juniors also suffer here because they don't learn the code if they're just believing what AI says about the code. genAI is often woefully incorrect about what certain code is doing, and with how big enterprise codebases often are, there's no way it can paint the picture as well as a dev that's been working in that code (without any AI) for years. The juniors either fail to thrive as a result, or take a lot longer to come around to the realization that genAI is actually slowing them down.


@cwebber @[email protected]