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?
The preview for the reply notification for this comment started getting my brain so excited when my eyes scanned over the beginning. Screen grab:
They will save time by making them go pee in bottles