After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes

> org is likely in the 10's of thousands, there is no way to even have a mandatory meeting for that many people.

Ok, this is pretty off-topic, but is this still true? I get that you can't have 10K people all actively participate in the meeting at the same time, but doesn't Zoom have a feature where you can broadcast to thousands and thousands?

Doesn't X/Twitter have a feature like this? (Although, to be fair, the last time I heard about that it was part of a headline like "DeSantis announcement of Presidential run on X/Twitter delayed for hours as X/Twitter's tech stack collapses under 200K viewers")

But still - nowadays it seems like it should be possible to have 10K employees all tune in at the same time and then call it a meeting, yes?

With tens of thousands in a meeting, cracking a 30-second stupid joke is probably costing several thousand dollars.

Is that because you delegate or descope?

Why is an SVP doing this if it's just gonna be ignored?

are you saying SVP’s words are not important and should be ignored? This is not what I remember back in the day when Bezos sent his email with a question mark (or maybe !)

so.... is RTO optional

> He asked staff to attend the meeting, which is normally optional.

If I get a note from my boss like that, I consider it mandatory.

Then I spin up another agent to listen to the agent who went to the meeting and make any necessary adjustments to the output of my coding agents based on the new rules it heard about from the meeting agent.

> It says he “asked” staff to attend the meeting

Being "asked" by your boss to attend an optional meeting is pretty close to being required, it's just got a little anti-friction coating on it.

Your characterization of the event as a simple reminder to follow established best practices is directly contradicted by the briefing note of the meeting, which specifically mentions a lack of best practices related to AI. Which makes me skeptical of your assessment of the situation in general.

> Under “contributing factors” the note included “novel GenAI usage for which best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established”.

> senior engineers have always been required to sign off on changes from junior engineers.

definitely a team by team question. if it was required it would be a crux rule that the code review isnt approved without an l6 approver.

Funny, I was automatically refunded for a pair of shoes that Amazon thought I never received even though I’m wearing them right now. I couldn’t even find a way to dispute the refund so I just took the win…

Exactly. This is real world pushback on the "software is solved" narrative from AI labs. Also, most orgs try to copy Amazon for some reason more than big tech firms. "At our org, we disagree and commit" - yeah you made that one up yourself. Anyway, this is going to have a lot of impact in my view.

There was nothing mentioned in the meeting or messaging about PRs with AI contributions. There are no extra requirements for review or scrutiny of AI-generated-code. The media reports about this have been excessively misleading about this.

It's not extra scrutiny. Doing code reviews for every commit is a standard practice at Amazon and has been for a decade plus.

There's an explicit tension: SWEs would love that as a "get out of jail free" card, but their management chain is being evaluated by ajassy on AI/ML adoption. Admitting AI code as the root cause of a CoE is gonna look really bad unless/until your peers are also copping to it.

Word around the campfire is, telling stories and exaggerating them to get people attention, is as old as humanity.

But good journalism is still something else.

True enough!

Amazon has had a really bad string of various outages recently. Assuming they're internally treating this as business as usual in post-mortems then perhaps the newsworthy thing is actually that they aren't taking their outages seriously enough.

> the headline deliberately tries to blow this up into a big deal

I do not understand how “company that runs half the internet has had major recent outages and now explicitly names lax/non-existent LLM usage guidelines as a major reason” can possibly not be a big deal in the midst of an industry-wide hype wave over how the world’s biggest companies now run agent teams shipping 150 pull requests an hour.

The chain of events is “AWS has been having a pretty awful time as far as outages go”, and now “result of an operational meeting is that the company will cut down on the use of autonomous AI.” You don’t need CoT-level reasoning to come to the natural conclusion here.

If we could, as a species, collectively, stop measuring the relevance of a piece of news proportionally by how much we like hearing it, please?

> make as few parts as possible critical, and make the potential bad outcomes as benign as possible

This is a good lesson for anyone I think. Definitely something I’m going to think more about. Thanks for sharing!

Everyone is sloppy sometimes. I wonder if what code review does is prevent velocity (acts a a brake) so that things dont change too fast (which is often a good thing).

You don't get paid for features or code shipped. People don't pay $200 a head for fine dining based on the number of carrot chops or garlic crushes. The chops and crushes are necessary but not what you should be optimizing for.

That could work but plenty of quiet heros weren’t promoted for fixing critical bugs.

That is in no way guaranteed. Sometimes finding too many security issues makes you unpopular.

Two years afterward, we got hit with ransomware. And obviously "I told you so" isn't a productive discussion topic at that point.

That's not preventing the issue, though. The closest you can get to this is to have another competitor be burned hard and demonstrate how your code base has the exact same issue. But even that isn't guaranteed. "that can't happen here" is a hard mindset to disrupt unless you yourself are already a C suite.

Alternately, have a small team where you trust everyone.

No, but that's the crux of the AI problem in software. Time to write code was never the bottleneck. AI is most useful for learning, either via conversation or by seeing examples. It makes writing code faster too, but only a little after you take into account review. The cases where it shines are high-profile and exciting to managers, but not common enough to make a big difference in practice. E.g AI can one-shot a script to get logs from a paginated API, convert it to ndjson, and save to files grouped by week, with minimal code review, but only if I'm already experienced enough to describe those requirements, and, most importantly, that's not what I'm doing every day anyway.

A related Dirty Secret that's going to become clear from all this is that a very large proportion of code in the wild (yes, even in 2026—maybe not in FAANG and friends, IDK, but across all code that is written for pay in the entire economy) has limited or no automated test coverage, and is often being written with only a limited recorded spec that's usually fleshed out only to the degree needed (very partial) as a given feature is being worked on.

What do the relatively hands-off "it can do whole features at a time" coding systems need to function without taking up a shitload of time in reviews? Great automated test coverage, and extensive specs.

I think we're going to find there's very little time-savings to be had for most real-world software projects from heavy application of LLMs, because the time will just go into tests that wouldn't otherwise have been written, and much more detailed specs that otherwise never would have been generated. I guess the bright-side take of this is that we may end up with better-tested and better-specified software? Though so very much of the industry is used to skipping those parts, and especially the less-capable (so far as software goes) orgs that really need the help and the relative amateurs and non-software-professionals that some hope will be able to become extremely productive with these tools, that I'm not sure we'll manage to drag processes & practices to where they need to be to get the most out of LLM coding tools anyway. Especially if the benefit to companies is "you will have better tests for... about the same amount of software as you'd have written without LLMs".

We may end up stuck at "it's very-aggressive autocomplete" as far as LLMs' useful role in them, for most projects, indefinitely.

On the plus side for "AI" companies, low-code solutions are still big business even though they usually fail to deliver the benefits the buyer hopes for, so there's likely a good deal of money to be made selling companies LLM solutions that end up not really being all that great.

These companies don't care about saving time or lowering operating costs, they have massive monopolies to subsidize their extremely poor engineering practices with. If the mandate is to force LLM usage or lose your job, you don't care about saving time; you care about saving your job.

One thing I hope we'll all collectively learn from this is how grossly incompetent the elite managerial class has become. They're destroying society because they don't know what to do outside of copying each other.

It has to end.

The submitter with their name on the Jira ticket saves time, the reviewer who has to actually verify the work loses a lot of time and likely just lets issues slip through.

To be honest, some times it's still beneficial.

For fairly straightforward changes it's probably a wash, but ironically enough it's often the trickier jobs where they can be beneficial as it will provide an ansatz that can be refined. It's also very good at tedious chores.

Some, but not very much. Writing code is hard. Ai will do a lot of tedious code that you procrastinate writing.