And too many people have their egos tied to its failure, too.

Im a massive AI skeptic. If anyone were to be jumping up and down on the corpse of AI and this incessant drive to use it everywhere, it’d be me. But I also work at Amazon. I got the email. I attended the meeting. I can personally attest that there are no new requirements for AI-generated code. The articles about this in the meeting at extremely misleading, if not outright wrong. But instead of believing the person that was actually there in the room, this thread is full of people dismissing my first-hand account of the situation because it doesn’t align with the “haha AI failed” viewpoint.

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.

That really isn’t the culture at Amazon. There are all-team meetings that happen all the time, and every now and then there is a reminder that “hey we’re gonna be talking about an interesting topic so you might want to join”, but it is certainly not a mandate or expectation that everyone will join.

Different companies have different cultures. Weird that people can’t grok this.

The message and meeting being discussed here have nothing to do with AWS or any outages AWS has faced recently. I think you’re missing the point of the discussion.

I don’t blame you, because this is just bad reporting (and potentially intentionally malicious to make you think it’s about AWS). But the meeting and discussion was with the Amazon retail teams, talking about Amazon retail processes, and Amazon retail services. The teams and processes that handle this are entirely separate from any AWS outages you are thinking of.

The outages that Amazon retail has faced also have nothing to do with AI, and there was no “explicit call out” about AI causing anything.

It’s not false. But it’s also weaselly worded.

Note that the article doesn’t say that he told staff they have to attend the meeting. It says he “asked” staff to attend the meeting. Which again, it’s really really normal for there to be an encouragement of “hey, since we just had an operational event, it would be good to prioritize attending this meeting where we discuss how to avoid operational events”.

As for the second quote: senior engineers have always been required to sign off on changes from junior engineers. There’s nothing new there. And there is nothing specific to AI that was announced.

This entire meeting and message is basically just saying “hey we’ve been getting a little sloppy at following our operational best practices, this is a reminder to be less sloppy”. It’s a massive nothingburger.