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.”
Well that’s going to make your senior developers quit.
I am not a developer, but:
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.
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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.
How can they fire them ?
They’re not employing them to look pretty you know.
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 are now a senior auditor.”
You’re absolutely right!