Fix the Process, Not the Gates

Recently, Amazon convened a mandatory engineering meeting after a string of outages tied to AI-assisted code changes. One outage took down the shopping experience for six hours. Another cost AWS hours of downtime after engineers let an AI coding tool make changes without adequate review. Amazon already had an approval process in place. It was either bypassed or not enforced . The fix was not to add a committee or freeze AI tool usage. It was targeted: developers now explicitly mark code as "AI-assisted" in commits, and that code gets a dedicated senior engineer review before merging, scoped to the highest-risk systems like checkout, payments, and inventory. Process that exists but is not followed is not process. And the fix was not more bureaucracy. It was visibility into what AI produced and accountability for what ships. That lines up with what a decade of DORA research tells us: heavyweight approval processes are one of the strongest predictors of poor delivery performance. The answ