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.”
Somwthing similar just happened to McKinsey, too.
as a sr, I would just keep rejecting them and make AI find “reasons” why.
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.
Wonder what the turnover rate in executives is. I bet it is about 8 years.
If only the lessons were painful for them and not just us/the workers.
LOL, so they can blame and fire SOMEONE.
Amazon saves the wages of a senior dev by doing that, but then they get outages costing them the wages of that senior dev for decades. I doubt the goal is to blame senior devs. If they wanted them gone they could easily fire them.
Well that’s going to make your senior developers quit.
“You are now a senior auditor.”
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.
I am not a developer, but:
I told the owner of the company recently that, and I quote, “I will fucking kill myself if my job becomes reviewing AI output”
Never kill yourself for something that’s somebody else’s fault.
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!
Bleach Boys - https://open.spotify.com/track/0o6zZmPn5a3FJMNjINjZIB
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.
You’re absolutely right!
It’s going to make snr devs get fired, surely?
They either refuse to sign off when boss wants them to and get fired or sign off and get fired when ai code they signed off on causes issues.
Bingo.
Maybe not outright fired, but absolutely open them up to career limits based on what you described.
All of Amazon’s code undergoes code reviews already. Accepting a PR is already spiritually a sign off.
This is just explicitly a threat, explicitly trying to find someone to hold accountable because you can’t hold ai accountable. What are they gonna do, fire the ai? Sign here to be the fall guy. Fuck off.
Senior devs are expensive.
- If they don’t quit, they are an accountability sink.
- If they do quit, amazon saves money on labor arbitrage.
Win, win! Brilliant! For amazon.
What are they gonna do, fire the ai?
Well… yes?
Hold the Fucking C-suites accountable
How can they fire them ?
They’re not employing them to look pretty you know.
Easy, it’s next quarter’s problem.
Or quit/find new jobs. I suspect that’s by design by Business Idiots.
*Get rid of the most expensive engineers and the cheaper ones can just use AI to make up the difference in output. And we can make the lower engineers the fall guy when convenient and replace them at our leisure *
The disdain bosses have for average people is astonishing.
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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.
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.
Keep taking Ls Amazon!
Morged.
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.
Hahaha IT’S ALL ON YOU NOW. HAVE FUN!
- Fuckin no one who should ever not be beat to death with a printed stack of emails
“Everyone must use AI.”
…
“No! Not like that!”
I seriously don’t understand how something as static as Amazon, a fucking webpage serving up pictures and ads, generating orders, needs to constantly write software in these quantities.
AWS is not a simple web page.
This is cited as the e-commerce dept
There you go https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/amzn/metrics/revenue-by-segment/ but TL;DR: AWS is more than 15% of their revenue and it keeps on growing.
Also note that AWS is more than half of income, with a much higher margin than commerce
Yeah I’m not quite sure you understand how webpages or the massive backend processes that keep it afloat work.
That’s not the point. Once it is done, isn’t it done? Either it works or not. It worked 5 years ago. Should work today. I don’t find myself being awed at how much better my Amazon visits are today compared to five years ago.
It isn’t done. It really is never done. Purely from a “keeping the lights on” mode, you still fix minor bugs, update dependencies, fix vulnerabilities and maybe even make small code changes. Outside of that, you are always implementing new features, fixing old features, or creating tests/automation. All of that takes a lot of work and requires manpower.
Product managers are constantly pushing for new features. Those break and break things around them.
