this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2026
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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 57 points 6 days ago (5 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 20 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days 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Just ask the school of little girls in Iran which were likely targets picked by AI with out of date information about it being a barracks. Why bother confirming the target with current intel from the ground when no one's going to take the blame anyway?

[–] Joeffect@lemmy.world 9 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

If you ask a writer what is Ai good for? They will say it's good for art. But never use it for writing, because it's terrible at it.

If you ask a artist what is Ai good for? They will say it's good for writing. but never use it for art, because it's terrible at it.

[–] Mongostein@lemmy.ca 3 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Conclusion… it’s good at neither… or am I missing your point?

[–] Overzeetop@sopuli.xyz 6 points 6 days ago

The output looks good to people who are poorly versed in the segment for which AI is being asked to perform, but often inefficient or fails in ways that an expert in the field would never miss.

---ignore this part, I'm just rambling from here on Depending on the context, you'll almost certainly get something that looks correct on first glance, especially if you're not an expert. If you're an expert, you wouldn't need to ask for such a task and, if you did to save time, you'd probably end up adjusting, correcting, or fixing several things to produce a production-ready output. I use it regularly for code because the last language I had any training in proper syntax was Fortran 77. And eventually the simple tasks I ask it to code for me work. I've asked it to do some excel calculations (I'm not an excel expert, I do a lot of mathematic manipulation in custom sheets) and some of them work, but most are either wildly convoluted or relay on obscure calls/functions rather than simply using standard logic and mathematic operations which are easy to edit and change. I've also asked it to do some graphical illustration (because I'm not a graphic artist) and it has produced nice looking illustrations with zero basis in reality - i.e. "draw me an outline of Scotland in the style you'd see on a tourist map and label, with a star, these four cities". It produced what I would expect an average American would estimate the outline of Scotland looked like and was equally as accurate with the location of the four cities (i.e. utterly incorrect).

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[–] Zink@programming.dev 44 points 6 days ago (1 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.

[–] Thermite@lemmings.world 12 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (2 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.

[–] Overzeetop@sopuli.xyz 8 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 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.

[–] Zink@programming.dev 4 points 6 days ago

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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[–] laranis@lemmy.zip 38 points 6 days ago (1 children)

How in the glorious fuck was this not a thing from the start? In a system this big and this critical all code should be reviewed by cognizant individuals. Anyone who thought an LLM would be perfect and not need code reviews has their heads so far up their asses they can see through their pee hole.

[–] titanicx@lemmy.zip 15 points 6 days ago

If you do this, you signal the AI isn't ready for production capabilities, which limits your sales groups capability to market it. Which is in reality the actual case and AI sucks and should never be trusted.

[–] Simulation6@sopuli.xyz 36 points 6 days 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 10 points 6 days ago

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

[–] WraithGear@lemmy.world 16 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] laranis@lemmy.zip 9 points 6 days ago

This 1000x. You think that senior dev got to that level hoping one day all they'd have to do is evaluate randomly generated code? No! They want to create, build, design, integrate, share. Cut out the middle, useless step and get back to the work these professionals have dedicated their careers to.

[–] nightlily@leminal.space 15 points 6 days ago (1 children)

If my job ends up being reviewing AI code spammed at me by vibe coding juniors all day, I’m joining a nunnery.

[–] Repelle@lemmy.world 3 points 6 days ago

If nunneries are as gay as I always imagined in my head, I’m in.

[–] GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 18 points 6 days ago

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

[–] Bytemeister@lemmy.world 12 points 6 days ago (2 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 5 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

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

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[–] DarrinBrunner@lemmy.world 12 points 6 days 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!"

[–] resipsaloquitur@lemmy.world 8 points 6 days ago
[–] piranhaconda@mander.xyz 5 points 6 days ago
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