Amazon Made the Right Call. For the Wrong Reasons.

Amazon had three major AWS outages in 2025. The internal postmortems, according to reporting from Ars Technica, pointed to a common thread: AI-assisted code changes that senior engineers hadn't reviewed. The fix Amazon landed on is blunt and old-fashioned. Senior engineers now sign off before AI-assisted changes ship. The comment section on Hacker News had 364 comments and most of them were engineers arguing about whether this was wise policy or bureaucratic panic. Both sides have a point. Neither side is fully right. What Actually Happened AI coding tools write plausible code. That's the problem. Not that they write bad code, but that they write code that looks correct, passes linters, clears automated tests, and still fails in production because it misunderstood the operational context it was being deployed into. The failure mode isn't syntax errors. It's semantic ones. An AI-assisted change might correctly implement the logic it was asked to implement and still bring down a service