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.”
Sorry for the necro reply, been away for a but. It was a great icebreaker, actually. Still a little nerve-wracking given it was my first presentation outside of my directorate, but it was clear that this was a no-bullshit zone.
If you’ve seen NASA-related movies like The Martian, Apollo 13, or Hidden Figures the portrayal of the enthusiast/no-bs engineers and managers is actually true. There’s no tiptoeing around or “whistling through the graveyard” - you see a problem, you talk it out. And it can get animated. But I can only think of a handful of cases where things ended in an impasse because we had the (math/science) resources to make sure things were right. Obviously that doesn’t mean failures don’t happen, but it really fine tuned the way I approach engineering problems to eliminate as many failure modes as was practical.
thanks!