Can it get any worse?

Amazon has mandated that senior engineers (L5+) must sign off on all code changes made by junior and mid-level engineers, amid a backdrop of 30,000 layoffs, a push for 80% of developers to use AI coding tools (specifically Amazon's internal tool Kira), and multiple high-profile outages attributed to AI-generated code causing unsafe production practices. The author argues this creates a paradox: AI tools accelerate code generation but the mandatory senior review bottleneck will slow everything down. The broader critique is that AI coding tools are being sold as production-ready replacements while the infrastructure around them (GitHub reliability, code quality, process guardrails) hasn't kept pace, leading to 'cognitive debt' across the organization.