Tony BarkMar 10

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

https://pawb.social/post/40954831

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

> Amazon’s ecommerce business has summoned a large group of engineers to a meeting on Tuesday for a “deep dive” into a spate of outages, including incidents tied to the use of AI coding tools. > > The online retail giant said there had been a “trend of incidents” in recent months, characterized by a “high blast radius” and “Gen-AI assisted changes” among other factors, according to a briefing note for the meeting seen by the FT. > > Under “contributing factors” the note included “novel GenAI usage for which best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established.”

Show threadBrianTheeBiscuiteerMar 11

Junior and mid-level engineers will now require more senior engineers to sign off any AI-assisted changes, Treadwell added.

So instead of getting a human to write it and AI peer reviewing it you want the most expensive per hour developers to look at stuff a human didn’t write and the other engineers can’t explain? Yeah, this is where the efficiency gains disappear.

I read stuff from one of my Jr’s all the time and most of it is made with AI. I don’t understand most of it and neither does the Dev. He keeps saying how much he’s learned from AI but peer programming with him is the pits. I try to say stuff like, “Oops! Looks like we forgot the packages.” And then 10 secs of silence later, “So you can go to line 24 and type…”

Show threadJoe

It’ll be temporary, a gut reaction to add more experienced engineers in the loop. These folks will try to codify and then push better checks/guardrails into CI/CD and tooling to save themselves time. Given how new this all is, it’s almost the blind leading the blind though.

Amazon might also have some poor system boundaries, leading to non-critical systems/code impacting critical systems. Or they just let junior devs with their AI tools run wild on critical components without adequate guardrails… also likely. :-P

Mar 11 at 6:17amWeb