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.”

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[–] 29 points 7 months ago (4 children)

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

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  • [–] 10 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    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"

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  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago* (1 child)

    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).

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  • [–] 5 points 6 months ago

    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.

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