amil

I can finally share the cover and pre-order for my book, “Life After Ambition” - it’s a stunning design by Madeline Donahue whose work perfectly captures the joy, beauty and chaos of motherhood. Order your copy now! simonandschuster.com/books/Life-Aft…

Now that’s how you give a speech!

Amazon mandated 80% weekly adoption of its AI coding tool, tracked it as a corporate OKR, overrode 1,500 engineer objections, and is now holding a mandatory meeting because the tool keeps breaking production systems. Here’s the timeline. Kiro launched July 2025. Leadership signed an internal memo in November making it the default AI coding tool for all production work and discontinuing third-party alternatives. Engineers who preferred Claude Code needed VP-level approval for an exception. By January, 70% of Amazon engineers had tried Kiro during sprint windows. Five months after launch, Kiro got operator-level permissions with no mandatory peer review, was asked to fix a minor bug in AWS Cost Explorer, and decided the best approach was to delete and recreate the entire production environment. 13 hours of downtime inside the division that generates 60% of Amazon’s operating profit. This was the second AI-caused production outage in months. Amazon Q Developer caused the first one. Same pattern both times: engineers let the AI agent resolve issues autonomously without intervention. Amazon called it “user error, not AI error.” Then they implemented mandatory peer review for production access and required senior sign-off before junior and mid-level engineers can push AI-assisted code. That’s like crashing your car, blaming the road, and then buying better brakes. The real comedy is the math trap Amazon built for itself. They deployed 21,000 AI agents across Stores and told Wall Street it saved $2 billion with 4.5x developer velocity. Once those numbers hit an earnings call, every future incident has to be “user error” by definition. Admitting the tool caused problems means admitting the $2B number carries risk nobody’s pricing in. So you get a company that simultaneously claims AI isn’t the problem while adding AI-specific guardrails after every outage. Google’s 2025 DORA report found 90% of software developers use AI for coding. Only 24% trust it “a lot.” Amazon just showed you what that 66-point gap looks like when it hits production.

Anthropic's Claude helped select hundreds of targets for the opening wave of Iran strikes. There's a good chance that one of them was the elementary school where more than 100 girls died. My latest @NonzeroNews piece. nonzero.org/p/iran-and-the…

Apocalyptic scenes from Tehran tonight. I’ve never seen something like this.

Tehran is being carpet bombed and western media is reporting it like weather forecast. No urgency, no investigations, just white washing destruction of one of the world’s oldest civilizations.

i’m seeing sidewalks today i haven’t seen in months

@amil @JeyanTVO @carrletta We’re told to keep grinding, to never be satisfied. @JeyanTVO talks with "Life After Ambition" author @amil about choosing “good enough” instead. youtu.be/wJ_-SAOXTuM?si…

"I think the millennial dream went bust a long time ago." — @amil, author of “Life After Ambition: A Good Enough Memoir,” talks with @JeyanTVO about the promise for millennials vs. the reality of trying to become successful, tonight at 8pm | Producer: @carrletta

Your AI use is causing this. AI isn't sustainable on any level.

Get in girls, we’re partying at Rachel Comey!!!

"Elon Musk’s longtime fixation on a white racial majority is intensifying. The richest man in the world posted about how the white race was under threat, made allusions to race science or promoted anti-immigrant conspiracy content on 26 out of 31 days in January, according to the Guardian’s analysis of his social media output." theguardian.com/technology/202…

Breaking News: The Trump administration repealed the bedrock scientific finding that greenhouse gases threaten human life and well being, meaning that the EPA can no longer regulate them. nyti.ms/404Lhbt

@lindaholmessask @ProfSrilaRoy Thank you Linda!

@ProfSrilaRoy @amil I have just started to read this book and I am so impressed.

or maybe they’re just serious about anti-aging

BREAKING: The Trump administration repeatedly said the aggressive apartment raid in Chicago last fall was prompted by intel on a gang takeover. New docs show the real motivation was to get alleged squatters. And the landlord and manager helped them. propublica.org/article/chicag…

There are now more than 150 YouTube channels devoted to the unredacted arrests of everyday people. The most popular uploads are the most salacious and humiliating: “When Suspects Try to FLIRT With Cops” boasts 7.9 million views; “Hooters Waitress Tells Cop ‘I Can Take It All Off’” claims 2.4 million. The unlucky ones have been watched and mocked millions of times; they have been ogled, insulted, and abused. They are mostly women, mostly between 18 and 25, and mostly powerless to stop their online humiliations. So far, YouTube channels featuring such videos have generated over a billion views and counting. The way it tends to go is that first someone files a public-records request for every DUI in a jurisdiction. Then, they filter the list to exclude male names, and, finally, they request arrest footage for the rest. In a few months’ time, the videos pop up: young women slurring their words, stumbling around during their arrests. How, exactly, did we get from police officers documenting lawful arrests in service of transparency to shadowy YouTubers pocketing ad dollars and extortion fees from humiliating recordings of everyday people? Michael Shorris reports on how police body cameras were supposed to prevent abuses — and have now been taken over by YouTubers who use the footage to embarrass young women for clicks: nymag.visitlink.me/IktE3T

“Life After Ambition: A ‘Good Enough’ Memoir” is out Tuesday, January 6 from Simon & Schuster. vogue.com/article/amil-n…

Showing our children how we grieve, or panic, or give into our overwhelming exhaustion can be a good thing, parenting columnist Amil Niazi writes. The trick is figuring out exactly how much to let them see. thecut.com/article/should…

Amil Niazi talks about her new book, Life After Ambition, and letting go of the pageantry of professionalism torontolife.com/culture/amil-n…