Amazon Now Requires Senior Engineers to Sign Off on AI Code — Here's Why That Matters

Amazon just told junior and mid-level engineers they need a senior engineer to sign off on any AI-assisted code change. This came after a series of outages, including one on March 2 where their own AI tool Q was flagged as a primary contributor to lost orders and website errors. An internal briefing described a "trend of incidents" with high blast radius involving gen-AI assisted changes. Amazon's SVP of e-commerce services Dave Treadwell reportedly pushed for the new policy. The company publicly downplayed it, with a spokesperson telling Business Insider it's "not accurate" that all AI changes need sign-off. But internal documents tell a different story. The real problem isn't bad code Here's what's interesting. This isn't Amazon saying AI code is bad. They're saying AI code without oversight is bad. There's a difference. The problem isn't that AI writes broken code. It's that AI writes plausible-looking code that passes a quick glance. A junior dev generates something with Copilot or