Amazon is now mandating that senior engineers sign off on any AI-assisted code changes submitted by junior or mid-level staff
Amazon is seeing a surge in service disruptions linked to the use of generative AI coding tools, prompting senior leaders to call emergency meetings with engineers, according to the Financial Times.
Following a series of outages, including a six-hour shutdown of its retail website this month, Amazon’s senior VP Dave Treadwell reportedly sent a note to engineers noting that some of the recent outages have been traced back to “Gen-AI assisted changes.”
In response, Amazon now requires senior engineers to approve any AI-assisted code changes submitted by junior or mid-level developers. The move follows reports that Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered a 13-hour disruption in December after its Kiro AI coding tool made unauthorized deletions.
The outages reflect the limitations of vibe coding, which is now common among developers. It is where humans provide prompts while AI handles coding and completes tasks or develops products.
A 2025 report from CodeRabbit analyzed 470 pull requests and found that AI-generated code contained 1.7 times as many issues as human-written code.
To help spot bugs, Anthropic recently launched a Code Review feature in its widely used Claude Code tool. However, analysts estimate each review could cost between $15 to $25.
Amazon is also facing concerns from engineers that recent layoffs have stretched teams thin and increased the frequency of bugs in coding. But the e-commerce giant continues to double down on AI deployment. It laid off 16,000 corporate roles in January.