Amazon makes senior engineers the human filter for AI-generated code after a series of outages

Following a series of allegedly AI-caused outages, Amazon is turning its senior engineers into human filters for AI-generated code.

"Folks, as you likely know, the availability of the site and related infrastructure has not been good recently," writes Dave Treadwell, Senior Vice President at Amazon, in an internal email obtained by the Financial Times. A briefing identifies a "trend of incidents" with a "high blast radius," linked to "Gen-AI assisted changes." Recently, there have been reports that Amazon's AI coding tools may have also contributed to two AWS outages.

The consequence: Junior and mid-level engineers now require sign-off from a senior engineer for all AI-assisted code changes. Standard code reviews have always existed at Amazon, but a dedicated approval requirement specifically for AI-generated output is new. Experienced developers are thus effectively becoming human quality filters for machine-generated code. Their role is shifting: away from building, toward reviewing what the machine has built.

Among the causes, the internal briefing cites "novel GenAI usage for which best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established."