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After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes (arstechnica.com)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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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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[–] 49 points 7 months ago (7 children)

"Huge rich company responsible for hosting like half of the fucking internet spent the last year pushing code to global-scale production without so much as a review by a senior engineer."

That's how I read that headline.

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  • [–] 13 points 7 months ago* (6 children)

    I read it as "now a senior developer will be at fault for all AI code." Do you think they will have time to review all that code properly and do their jobs.

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  • [–] 10 points 7 months ago* (3 children)

    One of my first big jobs at NASA was as a lead engineer on a multi-experiment platform to fly on the space shuttle. I checked all the work and compiled all the data and trotted my 27 year old self down to Johnson to present my case to the Safety Board. When I stood up to present, the head of the panel asked if I knew why I was there. I confidently told him that I was there to walk them through my evaluation of each of the payload components and show that the payload was safe to fly. He smiled. He then said "You're here because if something goes wrong on this mission, there had to be one ass to kick. Proceed."

    Everyone needs an ass to kick, and AI doesn't offer that function.

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  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    That sounds like an almost refreshing "you're one of us now / welcome to the real thing" type of brutal honesty.

    Did it have a friendly tone and/or serve as an ice breaker before your presentation?

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Sorry for the necro reply, been away for a but. It was a great icebreaker, actually. Still a little nerve-wracking given it was my first presentation outside of my directorate, but it was clear that this was a no-bullshit zone.

    If you've seen NASA-related movies like The Martian, Apollo 13, or Hidden Figures the portrayal of the enthusiast/no-bs engineers and managers is actually true. There's no tiptoeing around or "whistling through the graveyard" - you see a problem, you talk it out. And it can get animated. But I can only think of a handful of cases where things ended in an impasse because we had the (math/science) resources to make sure things were right. Obviously that doesn't mean failures don't happen, but it really fine tuned the way I approach engineering problems to eliminate as many failure modes as was practical.

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