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After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes (arstechnica.com)
submitted 3 months 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 56 points 3 months ago

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 19 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months 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Just ask the school of little girls in Iran which were likely targets picked by AI with out of date information about it being a barracks.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 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

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.

[-] monkeyslikebananas2@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago

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

[-] merc@sh.itjust.works 6 points 3 months ago

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.

[-] monkeyslikebananas2@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago

Yeah that’s what I mean by extra work. I can make the change myself or I can argue with claude code until it does what I want.

this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2026
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