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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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[–] 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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