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.”
“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.
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.
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.
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?
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”?
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?
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.
Conclusion… it’s good at neither… or am I missing your point?
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).
Or I suppose add extra work by walking an AI tool through making small incremental changes.
In my experience, LLMs suck at making smart, small changes. To know how to do that they need to “understand” the entire codebase, and that’s expensive.
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!”
“Everyone must use AI.”
…
“No! Not like that!”
The way AI is being pushed onto workers on a global scale has to be the dumbest thing to ever happen in the work space. Executives are getting hysterical over something they don’t even try to understand and even governments shower companies in subsidies if they do anything with AI. Of course the only result so far are mass layoffs and exploding costs for energy and hardware. All the while economies are crumbling everywhere because of course they do when mass unemployment sweeps around the globe. And again, governments everywhere are subsiding this crap with tax payer money. What’s even worse than all of that is the insane environmental damage all of this causes. But I’ll have to cut myself short here because I’m just getting increasingly upset here.
I guess what I’m trying to say is: We’re funding our own decline in rapid speed. Human stupidity has found a new peak in 2026 and it’s not even close. I knew the way AI was advertised was completely overblown years ago but I never anticipated it would get this bad this quickly.
Unsurprisingly, there’s a disconnect between executives/middle managers and people actually doing the job. The first group has fallen for the 10x productivity boost ads that the AI companies were selling them, while the actual boost for developers has been minimal, if any. That’s why it’s being pushed hard from the top.
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…”
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.
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.as a sr, I would just keep rejecting them and make AI find “reasons” why.
If my job ends up being reviewing AI code spammed at me by vibe coding juniors all day, I’m joining a nunnery.
If nunneries are as gay as I always imagined in my head, I’m in.
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.
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.
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.
If only the lessons were painful for them and not just us/the workers.
I seriously don’t understand how something as static as Amazon, a fucking webpage serving up pictures and ads, generating orders, needs to constantly write software in these quantities.
AWS is not a simple web page.
