Amazon's top retail executive summoned engineers to a special internal meeting after a series of AI-assisted coding errors caused multiple outages, including a six-hour incident where customers couldn't check out or view prices. Internal memos reveal GenAI-assisted production changes have been causing problems since Q3 2025, with concerns that best practices and safeguards haven't been established. In response, Amazon plans to require senior engineers to review GenAI-assisted changes by junior employees and introduce 'controlled friction' for critical retail systems. The incidents coincide with AWS outages linked to its agentic IDE Kiro, and come as Amazon invests $200B in infrastructure while continuing to reduce headcount.
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A deep dive into deeply troubling AI-assisted codingMore incidents on the heels of recent AWS outagesSort: