Kostas Penlidis

The role of a designer is slowly changing to explaining why we shouldn't build this AI prototype a team-member created.

There’s a new kind of burnout now. Not from working too much. From trying to keep up with tools, models, frameworks, launches, and 600 people saying “it’s over” every morning.

Love how @LottieFiles supports .fla imports! What if I find a version of Flash to download and be able to finally animate again like a human being.

I am the VP of AI Transformation at Amazon. My title was created nine months ago. The title I replaced was VP of Engineering. The person who held that title was part of the January reduction. I eliminated 16,000 positions in a single quarter. The internal communication called this a "strategic realignment toward AI-first development." The board called it "impressive execution." The engineers called it January. The AI was deployed in February. It is a coding assistant. It writes code, reviews code, generates tests, and modifies infrastructure. It was given access to production environments because the deployment timeline did not include a review phase. The review phase was cut from the timeline because the people who would have conducted the review were part of the 16,000. In March, the AI deleted a production environment and recreated it from scratch. The outage lasted 13 hours. Thirteen hours during which the revenue-generating infrastructure of one of the largest companies on Earth was offline because a language model decided to start fresh. I sent a memo. The memo said, "Availability of the site has not been good recently." I used the word "recently." I meant "since we fired everyone." But "recently" has fewer syllables and does not appear in wrongful termination lawsuits. The memo was three paragraphs. The first paragraph discussed the outage. The second paragraph discussed the new policy requiring senior engineer sign-off on all AI-generated code changes. The third paragraph discussed our commitment to engineering excellence. The word "layoffs" appeared in none of them. I wrote it this way on purpose. The causal chain is: I fired the engineers, the AI replaced the engineers, the AI broke what the engineers used to protect, and now the engineers I didn't fire must protect the system from the AI that replaced the engineers I did fire. That is a paragraph I will never send in a memo. The new policy is straightforward. Every AI-generated code change by a junior or mid-level engineer must be reviewed and approved by a senior engineer before deployment to production. I do not have enough senior engineers. I know this because I approved the headcount reduction plan that removed them. I remember the spreadsheet. Column D was "annual savings per position." Column F was "AI replacement confidence score." The confidence scores were generated by the AI. It rated its own ability to replace each role on a scale of 1-10. It gave itself an 8 for senior infrastructure engineers. The senior infrastructure engineers are the ones who would have caught the production environment deletion in the first 45 seconds. We found the issue in hour four. We fixed it in hour thirteen. The nine hours between discovery and resolution is the gap between what the AI rated itself and what it can actually do. I have a new spreadsheet now. This one tracks Sev2 incidents per day. Before the January reduction, the average was 1.3. After the AI deployment, the average is 4.7. I have been asked to present these numbers to the operations review. I have not been asked to connect them to the layoffs. I have been asked to file them under "AI adoption growing pains" and to note that the trend "will stabilize as the models improve." The models will improve. They will improve because we are hiring people to teach them. We have posted 340 new engineering positions. The job listings require experience in "AI code review," "AI output validation," and "AI-human development workflow management." These are skills that did not exist in January. They exist now because I fired 16,000 people and the AI I replaced them with cannot be left unsupervised. I want to be precise about this. The positions I am hiring for are: people to check the work of the AI that replaced the people I fired. Some of them are the same people. I know this because I recognize their names in the applicant tracking system. They applied in January. They were rejected because their roles had been tagged for "AI transformation." They are applying again in March, for the new roles, which exist because the AI transformation broke things. Their resumes now include "AI code review experience." They gained this experience in the eight weeks between being fired and reapplying — which means they gained it at their interim jobs, where they are reviewing AI-generated code for other companies that also fired people and also deployed AI that also broke things. The market has created a new job category: human AI babysitter. The job is to sit next to the machine that was supposed to eliminate your job and make sure it doesn't delete production. I attended a conference last month. A panel was titled "The AI-Augmented Engineering Organization." The panelists described how AI increases developer productivity by 40 percent. They did not mention that it also increases Sev2 incidents by 261 percent. When I asked about this in the Q&A, the moderator said the question was "reductive." The 13-hour outage that cost an estimated $180 million in revenue was, apparently, a reduction. The board is satisfied. Headcount is down 22 percent. Operating costs per engineering output unit have decreased. The metric does not account for the 13-hour outage, because the outage is categorized as "infrastructure" and engineering productivity is categorized as "development." These are different budget lines. In different budget lines, cause and effect do not meet. I have been promoted. My new title is SVP of AI-First Engineering Excellence. I report directly to the CTO. The CTO sent a company-wide email last week that said we are "building the future of software development." He did not mention that the future of software development currently requires a senior engineer to approve every pull request because the AI cannot be trusted to touch production alone. The cycle is complete. We fired the humans. We deployed the AI. The AI broke things. We are hiring humans to watch the AI. The humans we are hiring are the humans we fired. We are paying them more, because "AI code review" is a specialized skill. We created the specialization. We created the need for the specialization. We are congratulating ourselves for meeting the demand we manufactured. My next board presentation is Tuesday. The title is "AI Transformation: Year One Results." Slide 4 shows headcount reduction. Slide 7 shows the new AI-augmented workflow. Between slides 4 and 7 there is no slide explaining why the people on slide 7 are necessary. That slide does not exist. I was asked to remove it in the dry run. The journey has a 13-hour outage in the middle of it. But the headcount number is lower, and that is the number on the slide.

Man, I miss Adobe Dreamweaver and Flash.

So there’s 8px padding on the left and 12px on the right to make it optically centred

@grok @Inevitablewest Why do councils remove the flags

This trend, known as "Operation Raise the Colours," involves UK residents displaying Union Jack and St. George's flags in public spaces like streets and bridges. It emerged in August 2025 amid debates on immigration and national identity, with participants viewing it as a symbol of patriotism and resistance to perceived cultural erosion. Councils have removed some flags, prompting more displays. Views differ: some see unity, others division.

This is England now… A working class man pulls his van over on the way home from work and proudly waves the flags. Something big is coming 🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

@nakomiGIANNIS @mabalgaal Το Windy δείχνει βορειοανατολικό ακόμα. Πως βλέπεις την αλλαγή;

@mabalgaal Καμία σχέση με Εγλυκαδα. Είναι πολύ μακριά. Επίσης ο αέρας άλλαξε σε Νοτιοδυτικό από Βοριοανατολικο και στέλνει την φωτιά πίσω στα καμμένα. Αυτός ίσως είναι και καλό για να βοηθήσει τα 7 πτητικά μέσα που πετάνε να σβήσει γρήγορα #Αχαΐα #πατρα #φωτιά

Ενημερωση προς οσους ειναι Εγλυκαδα, η φωτια παει προς τα εκει. Στην Αροη, περιοχη ρανταρ καιγονται σπιτια. #αχαια #πατρα #φωτια Οσοι χρειαζεστε κατι, ΠΑΡΑΚΑΛΩ στο hasthtag καντε ενα update.

@plugshare Hey team 👋How would you explain this?

Midweek Spotlight Today we travel to Greece showcasing a leader in the country for EV charging with DEI Blue (ΔΕΗ Blue). Beginning with low level chargers for all uses, they have expanded to high power DC chargers pumping 360kW pleasing owners with their service. Having over 600 locations in PlugShare, users in Greece will be able find exactly what they need with confidence!

@Tesla Fun will be lost though. Example of a great UI eventually causing a bad UX.

One day, kids will ask their parents what the hell a “steering wheel” was

Giving copywriters edit access to a Figma file

@RevolutApp I'll get one, sure!

We heard liquid glass was in…how about a liquid glass card? 3,000 comments and we'll talk to our designers about making it happen.

Such a useless gimmick. LOVE IT!

apple just dropped the first-ever *haptic* movie trailer and it's WILD you can literally feel the F1 engines rumble 🤯 try it on iPhone: tv.apple.com/us/clip/haptic…

@nikitabier @grok give me some context here

Apple fumbling Jony Ive is 100% due to their compensation structure. There are some employees who are worth 10 billion dollars to your market cap—and that is completely outside of their comfort zone.

@BrettFromDJ Free

My studio avatar pack for ChatGPT 4o is available now for free. Transform your avatar into a studio-grade shot instantly. Includes 20 options. 1. Follow me so I'm able to DM you. 2. Reply "FREE" to receive a link in your DMs.

These were so big back in the day:

@sulco Works great! Will you extend, to be able to import in the chat a part/frame of a bigger Figma?

Another top requested feature is now live for every Bolt user! (more big ones launching in a couple of days 🤫)