<2> Amazon To Make Senior Engineers Sign Off On AI-Assisted Changes
<3> After a string of outages, Amazon has summoned a large group of engineers to a meeting to discuss the incidents, including those tied to the use of AI coding tools. The online retail giant has identified a “trend of incidents” in recent months, characterized by a “high blast radius” and “Gen-AI assisted changes” among other factors.
<3> According to a briefing note for the meeting seen by the Financial Times, the contributing factors to the outages include “novel GenAI usage for which best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established.” The note did not specify which particular incidents the group planned to discuss.
<3> Dave Treadwell, a senior vice-president at the group, told employees in an email that the availability of the site and related infrastructure has not been good recently. He asked staff to attend the meeting, which is normally optional, and announced that junior and mid-level engineers will now require more senior engineers to sign off any AI-assisted changes.
<3> Amazon said the review of website availability is “part of normal business” and it aims for continual improvement. The company also stated that its weekly “This Week in Stores Tech