Sean Gilligan

a good Soviet joke: a man orders a car. the car dealer says, "OK, comrade, your car will be ready in 10 years." the man says, "morning or afternoon?" dealer says, "comrade, it's 10 years away, how would that matter?" man says, "i have the plumber coming over that morning."

Amazon is holding a mandatory meeting about AI breaking its systems. The official framing is "part of normal business." The briefing note describes a trend of incidents with "high blast radius" caused by "Gen-AI assisted changes" for which "best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established." Translation to human language: we gave AI to engineers and things keep breaking? The response for now? Junior and mid-level engineers can no longer push AI-assisted code without a senior signing off. AWS spent 13 hours recovering after its own AI coding tool, asked to make some changes, decided instead to delete and recreate the environment (the software equivalent of fixing a leaky tap by knocking down the wall). Amazon called that an "extremely limited event" (the affected tool served customers in mainland China).