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.”
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.