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After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes (arstechnica.com)
submitted 18 hours ago by tonytins@pawb.social 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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[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 10 points 49 minutes ago (2 children)

What is AI good at? Creating thousands of lines of code that look plausibly correct in seconds.

What are humans bad at? Reviewing changes containing thousands of lines of plausibly correct code.

This is a great way to force senior devs to take the blame for things. But, if they actually want to avoid outages rather than just assign blame to them, they'll need to submit small, efficient changes that the submitter understands and can explain clearly. Wouldn't it be simpler just to say "No AI"?

[–] Earthman_Jim@lemmy.zip 1 points 6 minutes ago* (last edited 4 minutes ago)

AI's greatest feature in the eyes of the Epstein class is the ability to shift responsibility. People will do all kinds of fucked up shit if they can shift the blame to someone else, and AI is the perfect bag holder.

Just ask the school of little girls in Iran which were likely targets picked by AI with out of date information about it being a barracks.

[–] monkeyslikebananas2@lemmy.world 1 points 24 minutes ago

Or I suppose add extra work by walking an AI tool through making small incremental changes.

[–] WraithGear@lemmy.world 2 points 10 minutes ago* (last edited 9 minutes ago)

or hear me out, they can build it themselves so they don’t have to chase hallucinations. as a matter of fact, let’s cut the ai out of the project and leave it to summarizing emails.

[–] Bytemeister@lemmy.world 1 points 24 minutes ago (1 children)

AI is an assistant, not a replacement. It amazes me that Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and all these "tech leader" companies are going to make the same tech fuckup multiple times.

[–] Earthman_Jim@lemmy.zip 1 points 4 minutes ago* (last edited 3 minutes ago)

If only the lessons were painful for them and not just us/the workers.

[–] resipsaloquitur@lemmy.world 6 points 2 hours ago

Morged.

[–] DarrinBrunner@lemmy.world 5 points 2 hours ago

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!"

[–] Simulation6@sopuli.xyz 29 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] PlutoniumAcid@lemmy.world 7 points 5 hours ago

Likely, but you did not let poor code pass. That is valuable.

[–] GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 14 points 7 hours ago

as a sr, I would just keep rejecting them and make AI find "reasons" why.

[–] pirate2377@lemmy.zip 12 points 10 hours ago

Keep taking Ls Amazon!

[–] FosterMolasses@leminal.space 5 points 8 hours ago

[–] BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world 120 points 15 hours ago (4 children)

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..."

[–] TheSeveralJourneysOfReemus@lemmy.world 1 points 2 hours ago

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?

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world 5 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

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.

[–] RandallFlagg@lemmy.world 16 points 10 hours ago

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!

[–] jbloggs777@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 11 hours ago

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

[–] AbidanYre@lemmy.world 235 points 18 hours ago

"Everyone must use AI."

...

"No! Not like that!"

[–] inclementimmigrant@lemmy.world 136 points 18 hours ago (10 children)

Well that's going to make your senior developers quit.

[–] mrgoosmoos@lemmy.ca 44 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

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"

[–] grue@lemmy.world 43 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Never kill yourself for something that's somebody else's fault.

[–] TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 92 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) (2 children)

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

[–] Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 59 points 17 hours ago (4 children)

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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[–] otter@lemmy.ca 68 points 17 hours ago (3 children)

...

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

[–] pageflight@piefed.social 35 points 16 hours ago (2 children)

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."

[–] daychilde@lemmy.world 21 points 15 hours ago (3 children)

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.

[–] Hupf@feddit.org 6 points 9 hours ago

Yeah, initially writing the code never was the time sink.

[–] slaacaa@lemmy.world 9 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

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.

[–] MirrorGiraffe@piefed.social 5 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] daychilde@lemmy.world 3 points 3 hours ago

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.

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[–] PattyMcB@lemmy.world 26 points 17 hours ago (3 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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