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.”
Yes, so now when there’s a success, it gets attributed to AI. When there’s an outage, that’s the fault of humans not reviewing correctly. These senior engineers will get fucked in all scenarios.
Precisely. From Cory Doctorow’s latest, very insightful essay on AI, where he talks about the promise of AI replacing 9 out of 10 radiologists:
“if the AI misses a tumor, this will be the human radiologist’s fault, because they are the ‘human in the loop.’ It’s their signature on the diagnosis.”
This is a reverse centaur, and it’s a specific kind of reverse-centaur: it’s what Dan Davies calls an “accountability sink.” The radiologist’s job isn’t really to oversee the AI’s work, it’s to take the blame for the AI’s mistakes.
I don’t think it’s fair to compare LLM code generation to machine vision in this way. These very different "AI"s. Not necessarily disagreeing with Doctorow, but this is an important distinction.
Morged.
Couldn’t they, I don’t know, just go back to people writing the code, and stop using AI to do something it clearly can’t handle? Just an idea.
I guess they’ve invested (thrown) so much money at this thing, they’re determined to make it work. Also, I know they’ve gone into insanely deep debt and if it doesn’t work they’re going to lose an eye watering amount of money, and perhaps the bubble bursting will be the catalyst to bringing down the entire world economy.
Oh, so yeah, they do have great incentive to make this work, but I don’t see it happening. As usual, they fuck up and the rest of us pay the bill. None of the billionaires will suffer any more than loss of face over this. Even if they’ve broken laws, all they ever get is a small fine and a slap on the back, “Better luck, next time, ol’ boy!”
I always saw a code review like a dissertation defense. Why did you choose to implement the requirement in this way? Answers like ‘I found a post on Stackoverflow’ or ‘the AI told me to’ would only move the question back one step; why did you choose to accept this answer?
I was a very unpopular reviewer.Likely, but you did not let poor code pass. That is valuable.
as a sr, I would just keep rejecting them and make AI find “reasons” why.
Keep taking Ls Amazon!
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…”
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…”
So what kind of code is that? Code lyoko? Are they using more advanced code than their training should make one think?
Just to add to this:
- When a senior dev reviews code from a more junior dev and gives feedback the more junior person (generally) learns from it.
- When a senior dev reviews code from an AI, the AI does not learn from it.
So beyond the first order effects you pointed out - the using of more time from more experience and hence expensive people - there is a second order effect due of loss of improvement in the making of code which is both persistent and cumulative with time: every review and feedback of the code from a junior dev reduces forever the future need for that, whilst every review and feedback of the code from an AI has no impact at all in need for it in the future.
Given enough time, the total time wasted in reviews and feedback for code from junior devs is limited - because they eventually learn enough not to do such mistakes - but the total time wasted in reviews and feedback for code from an AI is unlimited - because it will never improve.
Seniors reviewing code is fine but only when, as someone else mentioned, the code writer is learning from the review. The AI doesn’t learn at all and the Jr Dev probably learns very little because they didn’t understand the original code. Reviewing AI code often turns into me rewriting most of it.
Exactly.
The best way to learn is to have done the work yourself with all the mistakes that come from not knowing certain things, having wrong expectations or forgetting to account for certain situations, and then get feedback on your mistakes, especially if those giving the feedback know enough to understand the reasons behind the mistakes of the other person.
Another good way to learn is by looking through good quality work from somebody else, though it’s much less effective.
I suspect that getting feedback on work of “somebody” else (the AI) which isn’t even especially good, yields very little learning.
So linking back to my previous post, even though the AI process wastes a lot of time from a more senior person, not only will the AI (which did most of the implementation) not learn at all, but the junior dev that’s supposed to oversee and correct the AI will learn very little thus will improve very little. Meanwhile with the process that did not involve an AI, the same senior dev time expenditure will have taught the junior dev a lot more and since that’s the person doing most of the work yielded a lot more improvement next time around, reducing future expenditure of senior dev time.
Lol I would be your Jr, except instead of 10 seconds of silence it would be 10 seconds of me frantically clacking on the keyboard “add a block to this for these packages with proper syntax, I forgot to include it” to claude. Then I’d of course be all discombobulated and shit so I wouldn’t even bother to open code, I’d just ctrl-c about 100 lines somewhere around the general area of where I think the new code block should go, then ctrl-v the whole thing into the chat box because why not the company is paying out the dick for these tokens so might as well use them.
And two weeks later half our website crashes which results in you having to go to a meeting where management tells you to keep a closer eye on me. Which is basically what you had been already doing before AI but now you get to babysit me and claude!
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
I seriously don’t understand how something as static as Amazon, a fucking webpage serving up pictures and ads, generating orders, needs to constantly write software in these quantities.
AWS is not a simple web page.
This is cited as the e-commerce dept
Yeah I’m not quite sure you understand how webpages or the massive backend processes that keep it afloat work.
There you go https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/amzn/metrics/revenue-by-segment/ but TL;DR: AWS is more than 15% of their revenue and it keeps on growing.
Also note that AWS is more than half of income, with a much higher margin than commerce
“Everyone must use AI.”
…
“No! Not like that!”
Well that’s going to make your senior developers quit.
I am not a developer, but:
I told the owner of the company recently that, and I quote, “I will fucking kill myself if my job becomes reviewing AI output”
Never kill yourself for something that’s somebody else’s fault.
Exactly. If you’re too stupid or lazy to adequately vet what your LLM puts out yourself, it shouldn’t be somebody else’s job to wade through the sewage you’re producing. You either shouldn’t be using one or, if you can’t do your job without it, you shouldn’t have that job.
—Someone who doesn’t use genAI but has spent way too much time digging through LLM slop
You know what my favorite pizza topping is? Bleach.
Dominoes REFUSES to put bleach on my pizza, so I gotta do it myself. I found out about it from AI. Now my pizza tastes great! The downside is having to go to the hospital to get a stomach pump everytime.
Bleach Boys - https://open.spotify.com/track/0o6zZmPn5a3FJMNjINjZIB
Here to save you from the comments about spotify.
People: Just take this Link. You do not need to comment how much you hate spotify
I mean honestly yeah, I’m not going to waste my time with some junior developer who can’t explain how the code works and how it interacts with whatever framework I’m working on. I ain’t got time for that nonsense, especially when the code I deal with involves safety critical sections of code.
Honestly if my work ever decided to allow unfettered AI code generation into my code base, I would immediately look for a new job at that point.
It’s going to make snr devs get fired, surely?
They either refuse to sign off when boss wants them to and get fired or sign off and get fired when ai code they signed off on causes issues.
Or quit/find new jobs. I suspect that’s by design by Business Idiots.
*Get rid of the most expensive engineers and the cheaper ones can just use AI to make up the difference in output. And we can make the lower engineers the fall guy when convenient and replace them at our leisure *
The disdain bosses have for average people is astonishing.
Bingo.
Maybe not outright fired, but absolutely open them up to career limits based on what you described.
All of Amazon’s code undergoes code reviews already. Accepting a PR is already spiritually a sign off.
This is just explicitly a threat, explicitly trying to find someone to hold accountable because you can’t hold ai accountable. What are they gonna do, fire the ai? Sign here to be the fall guy. Fuck off.
Hold the Fucking C-suites accountable
How can they fire them ?
They’re not employing them to look pretty you know.
Easy, it’s next quarter’s problem.
it’s pretty fucking stark right? these are the devs that stayed after management mandated they USE the shit in the first place, now they want the same devs to become responsible for what the shit does to their codebases.
You’re absolutely right!
“You are now a senior auditor.”
…
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
We may start to see people realize that “have the AI generate slop, humans will catch the mistakes” actually is different from “have humans generate robust code.”
Not only that, but writing code is so much easier than understanding code you didn’t write. Seems like either you need to be able to trust the AI code, or you’re probably better of writing it yourself. Maybe there’s some simple yet tedious stuff, but it has to be simple enough to understand and verify faster than you could write it. Or maybe run code through AI to check for bugs and check out any bugs it finds…
I definitely have trusted AI to write miniature pointless little projects - like a little PHP page that loaded music for the current directory and showed a simple JS player in a webpage so I could share Christmas music with my family and friends. No database, no file uploading or anything. It worked decently, although not perfectly, and that’s all it needed to do.
Yeah, initially writing the code never was the time sink.
This is true not just with code, but with many types of complex outputs. Going through and fixing somebody’s horrible excel model is much worse than building a good one yourself. And if the quality is really bad, it’s also just faster to do it yourself from scratch.
I’ve been writing a slightly larger project with frontend, bff and backend and I need to take it in small batches so that I can catch when it misunderstands or outright does a piss job of implementing something. I’ve been focusing a lot on getting all the unit tests I need in place which makes me feel a bunch better.
The bigger and more complex the projects get, the harder it is for the LLM to keep stuff in context which means I’ll have to improve my chunking out smaller scoped implementations or start writing code myself I think.
All in all I feel pretty safe with my project and pleased with the agents work but I need to increase testing further before bringing anything live.
Security testing will be the most important.
I’ve done a couple of tiny projects that I didn’t feel like coding. So far, I have not been terribly impressed. Well, it is impressive that it can make something functional at all, and in one case, what it made was fine enough to use as the temporary project it was intended (sharing christmas music with friends/family - reading files from a directory and writing a javascript player to play them in a shuffled order).
In the other case, replicating a simple text-based old DOS game with simple rules (think a space-based game around the complexity of checkers or so), it failed to think of so many things that while it did what I told it for the most part, it wasn’t a playable game. It was close, and fun enough for a nostalgic moment, but I had to work with it on logic like “If two fleets of ships arrive at the same planet in the same turn, you have to see how the first battle goes. If the first battle captures the planet, the second fleet is not attacking the first fleet’s ships - we won the planet at that point”. Very simple concepts that sure, you’d have to think of as a programmer, but if you were telling another person about how the game should work, were things I felt another person would think about.
I hope AI works well for you. Anywhere security it needed like database sanitation or user credentials… I hope you test thoroughly and I hope you can tell it enough to remind it to implement things like sanitation and other safety measures. An app can certainly appear to be working, but give many many fronts for attack. That’s my main worry with AI code. I worry enough on the little projects I do if I’m being secure enough myself.
*LLM
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
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”
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).
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.
When I worked there 20% of the work we had to do had to go through a senior engineer. And getting his time was like pulling teeth.
More of the time he would just nitpick grammar in docs and then finally rubber stamp work. It was awful.
the way private companies work is that they require their employees to produce more than is reasonable given the work quality that is expected.
when this discrepancy is pointed out, it’s handwaved away. when the discrepancy results in problems, as it most obviously will, somebody is found to place the blame on.
it’s not the developer’s faults. it’s a management decision.
source: I’m talking out of my ass I’m just a salty employee who is seeing this happen at their own workplace when it didn’t used to, at least not to this level
The way AI is being pushed onto workers on a global scale has to be the dumbest thing to ever happen in the work space. Executives are getting hysterical over something they don’t even try to understand and even governments shower companies in subsidies if they do anything with AI. Of course the only result so far are mass layoffs and exploding costs for energy and hardware. All the while economies are crumbling everywhere because of course they do when mass unemployment sweeps around the globe. And again, governments everywhere are subsiding this crap with tax payer money. What’s even worse than all of that is the insane environmental damage all of this causes. But I’ll have to cut myself short here because I’m just getting increasingly upset here.
I guess what I’m trying to say is: We’re funding our own decline in rapid speed. Human stupidity has found a new peak in 2026 and it’s not even close. I knew the way AI was advertised was completely overblown years ago but I never anticipated it would get this bad this quickly.
Unsurprisingly, there’s a disconnect between executives/middle managers and people actually doing the job. The first group has fallen for the 10x productivity boost ads that the AI companies were selling them, while the actual boost for developers has been minimal, if any. That’s why it’s being pushed hard from the top.
They want to move fast and break things but they still want a few meat bags around to blame when things inevitable blow up in their faces.
They don’t want to break the things that hurt their bottom line.
Break society and make everyone hate each other? Hey buddy - small price to pay. Gotta think of the shareholders, after all. (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
xD
Guess that all-in-on-AI attitude was not such a bold and brilliant idea after all.
