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.”
“Everyone must use AI.”
…
“No! Not like that!”
Well that’s going to make your senior developers quit.
Exactly. If you’re too stupid or lazy to adequately vet what your LLM puts out yourself, it shouldn’t be somebody else’s job to wade through the sewage you’re producing. You either shouldn’t be using one or, if you can’t do your job without it, you shouldn’t have that job.
—Someone who doesn’t use genAI but has spent way too much time digging through LLM slop
You know what my favorite pizza topping is? Bleach.
Dominoes REFUSES to put bleach on my pizza, so I gotta do it myself. I found out about it from AI. Now my pizza tastes great! The downside is having to go to the hospital to get a stomach pump everytime.
If you use antifreeze, it will make it sweet. Perfect for pineapple pizza!
I mean honestly yeah, I’m not going to waste my time with some junior developer who can’t explain how the code works and how it interacts with whatever framework I’m working on. I ain’t got time for that nonsense, especially when the code I deal with involves safety critical sections of code.
Honestly if my work ever decided to allow unfettered AI code generation into my code base, I would immediately look for a new job at that point.
it’s pretty fucking stark right? these are the devs that stayed after management mandated they USE the shit in the first place, now they want the same devs to become responsible for what the shit does to their codebases.
“You are now a senior auditor.”
Yes, so now when there’s a success, it gets attributed to AI. When there’s an outage, that’s the fault of humans not reviewing correctly. These senior engineers will get fucked in all scenarios.
Precisely. From Cory Doctorow’s latest, very insightful essay on AI, where he talks about the promise of AI replacing 9 out of 10 radiologists:
“if the AI misses a tumor, this will be the human radiologist’s fault, because they are the ‘human in the loop.’ It’s their signature on the diagnosis.”
This is a reverse centaur, and it’s a specific kind of reverse-centaur: it’s what Dan Davies calls an “accountability sink.” The radiologist’s job isn’t really to oversee the AI’s work, it’s to take the blame for the AI’s mistakes.
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.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.
If you do this, you signal the AI isn’t ready for production capabilities, which limits your sales groups capability to market it. Which is in reality the actual case and AI sucks and should never be trusted.
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.
LOL, so they can blame and fire SOMEONE.
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.
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!”
Aren’t their names already on the commits? Or is the AI given write access to their code repository?
They want to move fast and break things but they still want a few meat bags around to blame when things inevitable blow up in their faces.
Keep taking Ls Amazon!
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.
Wonder what the turnover rate in executives is. I bet it is about 8 years.
Morged.
