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 threadOtterMar 10

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Do the senior engineers NOT sign off on changes to systems that can take down the production servers? Even if we take out the LLM created code, this sounds like a bigger problem

Show threadPattyMcBMar 11

I guarantee there’s so much pressure on those engineers to deliver code that they rubber stamp a ton of it with the intention of “fixing it later”

Source: I’ve worked in software for 20+ years and know a lot of folks working for and who have worked for Amazon

Show threadPabloSexcrowbarMar 11
That’s basically the story at all the big tech companies, from what I’ve heard. In my time at Facebook, I felt like the only person who actually read the merge requests that people sent me before hitting it with “LGTM”
Show threadtalMar 11
If companies are going to place increasing reliance on review due to having lower-quality submissions, then they should probably evaluate employees weighting review quality (say, oh, rate of bugs subsequently discovered in reviewed commits or something like that).
Show threadragas

Sure. i’ll review your code favourably if you do the same with mine.

That is also a way to get no bugs at all.

Mar 11 at 7:41amWeb