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.”
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…”
Just to add to this:
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.
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.
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.
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!
So what kind of code is that? Code lyoko? Are they using more advanced code than their training should make one think?
It’s usually fine code but it just doesn’t follow the same conventions and flow. It’s kind of like reading a novel typed in block letters written in 3rd person then suddenly it’s cursive letters and 1st person.
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