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This “mandatory meeting” is just the usual weekly company-wide meeting where recent operational issues are discussed. There was a big operational issue last wee

This “mandatory meeting” is just the usual weekly company-wide meeting where recent operational issues are discussed. There was a big operational issue last week, so of course this week will have more attendance and discussion. This meeting happens literally every week, and has for years. Feels like the media is making a mountain out of a mole hill here.

otterley 7mo ago
> Feels like the media is making a mountain out of a mole hill here. That's been their job ever since cable news was invented.
- ses1984 7mo ago
  It’s been a bit longer than that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism It probably goes back as long as they have been shouting news in the town square in Rome or before that even.
  - otterley 7mo ago
    True enough!
  - lukan 7mo ago
    Word around the campfire is, telling stories and exaggerating them to get people attention, is as old as humanity. But good journalism is still something else.
davidclark 7mo ago
The article claims: >He asked staff to attend the meeting, which is normally optional. Is that false? It also discusses a new policy: >Junior and mid-level engineers will now require more senior engineers to sign off any AI-assisted changes, Treadwell added. Is that inaccurate? It is good context that this is a regularly scheduled meeting. But, regularly scheduled meetings can have newsworthy things happen at them.
- skeeter2020 7mo ago
  That's not really what the headline attempts to communicate though. It specifically emphasizes "Mandatory" and "AI breaking things". Nobody was going to click on "Regularly scheduled Amazon staff meeting will include discussion on operational improvement"
  - ceejayoz 7mo ago
    > He asked staff to attend the meeting, which is normally optional. If I get a note from my boss like that, I consider it mandatory.
    - idiotsecant 7mo ago
      But it gets less mandatory the more layers up you go. If I get an email from an SVP that is CC: the entire division saying everyone should go to a meeting I will almost certainly be able to ascertain the contents of that meeting in 10 seconds from someone else who did attend
      - brewdad 7mo ago
        Surely your boss notices your non-attendance.
        delecti 7mo ago
        If it's actually really mandatory, my manager will probably also relay that directly to me. And that resets the count for "less mandatory the more layers up you go".
        dpark 7mo ago
        Starting to wonder if some people who complain about all day meetings just don’t realize they are optional.
        idiotsecant 7mo ago
belval 7mo ago
I am not in that specific meeting but it made me chuckle that a weekly ops meeting will somehow get media attention. It's been an Amazon thing forever. Wait until the public learns about CoEs!
- 8note 7mo ago
  id.expect COEs to be coming up with AI code action items though, not to have more thorough human checks
  - coredog64 7mo ago
    There's an explicit tension: SWEs would love that as a "get out of jail free" card, but their management chain is being evaluated by ajassy on AI/ML adoption. Admitting AI code as the root cause of a CoE is gonna look really bad unless/until your peers are also copping to it.
    - 8note 7mo ago
      I think its a question 2 or 3 in a why chain, but 4 and 5 need to be why the agent screwed up, and there needs to be action items that are around giving the ai better guardrails, context, or tooling. "get a person to look at it" is a cop-out action item, and best intentions only. nothing that you could actually apply to make development better across the whole company
- cmiles74 7mo ago
  A weekly ops meeting where they talk about ensuring PRs with AI contributions get extra scrutiny? I think that's significant news.
  - osigurdson 7mo ago
    Exactly. This is real world pushback on the "software is solved" narrative from AI labs. Also, most orgs try to copy Amazon for some reason more than big tech firms. "At our org, we disagree and commit" - yeah you made that one up yourself. Anyway, this is going to have a lot of impact in my view.
CoolGuySteve 7mo ago
It didn't seem to make the news but at least in NYC the entire Amazon storefront was broken all afternoon on Friday. Items weren't displaying prices and it was impossible to add anything to your cart. It lasted from about 2pm to 5pm. It's especially strange because if a computer glitch brought down a large retail competitor like Walmart I probably would have seen something even though their sales volume is lower.
- kotaKat 7mo ago
  A little birdie told me someone pushed duplicate data into one of Amazon’s core noSQL systems that runs most of e-commerce. The front end of the site broke in weird ways but it certainly wasn’t taking orders.
- malfist 7mo ago
  Over the weekend I was trying to return a pair of shoes and get a different size and I kept getting 500s trying to go to the store page for the shoes.
  - chatmasta 7mo ago
    Funny, I was automatically refunded for a pair of shoes that Amazon thought I never received even though I’m wearing them right now. I couldn’t even find a way to dispute the refund so I just took the win…
    - BikiniPrince 7mo ago
      That explains why it kept changing the estimated received date. It was doing weird things.
- m3047 7mo ago
  Sometimes you squeeze clay and it comes out the oddest places. There were other stressors last week.https://www.pcmag.com/news/amazon-cloud-services-disrupted-in-uae-after-objects-hit-a-data-center https://www.pcmag.com/news/amazon-cloud-services-disrupted-i...
niwtsol 7mo ago
I believe it is by group - AWS started the weekly operations meeting, effectively every service's oncall from the last week had to attend. Then it grew massive, so they made it optional. Alexa had a similar meeting that tried to replicate what AWS did. A lot of time spent reviewing load tests getting ready for holiday season, prime day, and the superbowl (super bowl ads used to cause crazy TPS spikes for Alexa). And a lot of finger pointing if there was an outage from one team. While it probably did help raise the operational bar, so much time wasted by engineers on busywork/paperwork documenting an error or fix vs improving the actual service.
embedding-shape 7mo ago
> This meeting happens literally every week, and has for years. Feels like the media is making a mountain out of a mole hill here. Are you completely missing the point of the submission? It's not about "Amazon has a mandatory weekly meeting" but about the contents of that specific meeting, about AI-assisted tooling leading to "trends of incidents", having a "large blast radius" and "best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established". No one cares how often the meeting in general is held, or if it's mandatory or not.
- skeeter2020 7mo ago
  >> Are you completely missing the point of the submission no, and that's what people are noting: the headline deliberately tries to blow this up into a big deal. When did you last see the HN post about Amazon's mandatory meeting to discuss a human-caused outage, or a post mortem? It's not because they don't happen...
  - thepasch 7mo ago
    > the headline deliberately tries to blow this up into a big deal I do not understand how “company that runs half the internet has had major recent outages and now explicitly names lax/non-existent LLM usage guidelines as a major reason” can possibly not be a big deal in the midst of an industry-wide hype wave over how the world’s biggest companies now run agent teams shipping 150 pull requests an hour. The chain of events is “AWS has been having a pretty awful time as far as outages go”, and now “result of an operational meeting is that the company will cut down on the use of autonomous AI.” You don’t need CoT-level reasoning to come to the natural conclusion here. If we could, as a species, collectively, stop measuring the relevance of a piece of news proportionally by how much we like hearing it, please?
    - mattgreenrocks 7mo ago
      The defensiveness is almost as interesting as the meeting itself.
cmiles8 7mo ago
The core message of the article is that Amazon has been having issues with AI slop causing operational reliability concerns, and that seems to be 100% accurate.
- coredog64 7mo ago
  /with AI slop//
- inquirerGeneral 7mo ago
  [dead]
Clent 7mo ago
Who is the media you're accusing here? This is a twitter post. As far as I can tell they do not work a media company. What is worth being pointed out is how quickly people blame "The Media" for how people use, consume and spread information on social networks.
- otterley 7mo ago
  The source is not a Twitter post, it's a Financial Times article (that the poster failed to cite).
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
age1mlclg6 7mo ago
What has really happened is that those employees were made into "reverse centaurs": https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/18/tech-ai-bubble-burst-reverse-centaur https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/...
furyofantares 7mo ago
This reply chain is confusing but I'm guessing got merged from another thread that had a different title? Must have as the comments are hours older than OP.
groundzeros2015 7mo ago
It’s always sobering to see a news story about something you have insider perspective on.
rahbert 7mo ago
This is correct. We ran them on Wednesday’s in Alexa. Jessy actually used to come and sit in ours once a quarter or so when he was running AWS.

otterley 7mo ago

> Feels like the media is making a mountain out of a mole hill here. That's been their job ever since cable news was invented.

ses1984 7mo ago
It’s been a bit longer than that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism It probably goes back as long as they have been shouting news in the town square in Rome or before that even.
- otterley 7mo ago
  True enough!
- lukan 7mo ago
  Word around the campfire is, telling stories and exaggerating them to get people attention, is as old as humanity. But good journalism is still something else.

davidclark 7mo ago

The article claims: >He asked staff to attend the meeting, which is normally optional. Is that false? It also discusses a new policy: >Junior and mid-level engineers will now require more senior engineers to sign off any AI-assisted changes, Treadwell added. Is that inaccurate? It is good context that this is a regularly scheduled meeting. But, regularly scheduled meetings can have newsworthy things happen at them.

skeeter2020 7mo ago
That's not really what the headline attempts to communicate though. It specifically emphasizes "Mandatory" and "AI breaking things". Nobody was going to click on "Regularly scheduled Amazon staff meeting will include discussion on operational improvement"
- ceejayoz 7mo ago
  > He asked staff to attend the meeting, which is normally optional. If I get a note from my boss like that, I consider it mandatory.
  - idiotsecant 7mo ago
    But it gets less mandatory the more layers up you go. If I get an email from an SVP that is CC: the entire division saying everyone should go to a meeting I will almost certainly be able to ascertain the contents of that meeting in 10 seconds from someone else who did attend
    - brewdad 7mo ago
      Surely your boss notices your non-attendance.
      - delecti 7mo ago
        If it's actually really mandatory, my manager will probably also relay that directly to me. And that resets the count for "less mandatory the more layers up you go".
        dpark 7mo ago
        Starting to wonder if some people who complain about all day meetings just don’t realize they are optional.
      - idiotsecant 7mo ago

belval 7mo ago

I am not in that specific meeting but it made me chuckle that a weekly ops meeting will somehow get media attention. It's been an Amazon thing forever. Wait until the public learns about CoEs!

8note 7mo ago
id.expect COEs to be coming up with AI code action items though, not to have more thorough human checks
- coredog64 7mo ago
  There's an explicit tension: SWEs would love that as a "get out of jail free" card, but their management chain is being evaluated by ajassy on AI/ML adoption. Admitting AI code as the root cause of a CoE is gonna look really bad unless/until your peers are also copping to it.
  - 8note 7mo ago
    I think its a question 2 or 3 in a why chain, but 4 and 5 need to be why the agent screwed up, and there needs to be action items that are around giving the ai better guardrails, context, or tooling. "get a person to look at it" is a cop-out action item, and best intentions only. nothing that you could actually apply to make development better across the whole company
cmiles74 7mo ago
A weekly ops meeting where they talk about ensuring PRs with AI contributions get extra scrutiny? I think that's significant news.
- osigurdson 7mo ago
  Exactly. This is real world pushback on the "software is solved" narrative from AI labs. Also, most orgs try to copy Amazon for some reason more than big tech firms. "At our org, we disagree and commit" - yeah you made that one up yourself. Anyway, this is going to have a lot of impact in my view.

CoolGuySteve 7mo ago

It didn't seem to make the news but at least in NYC the entire Amazon storefront was broken all afternoon on Friday. Items weren't displaying prices and it was impossible to add anything to your cart. It lasted from about 2pm to 5pm. It's especially strange because if a computer glitch brought down a large retail competitor like Walmart I probably would have seen something even though their sales volume is lower.

kotaKat 7mo ago
A little birdie told me someone pushed duplicate data into one of Amazon’s core noSQL systems that runs most of e-commerce. The front end of the site broke in weird ways but it certainly wasn’t taking orders.
malfist 7mo ago
Over the weekend I was trying to return a pair of shoes and get a different size and I kept getting 500s trying to go to the store page for the shoes.
- chatmasta 7mo ago
  Funny, I was automatically refunded for a pair of shoes that Amazon thought I never received even though I’m wearing them right now. I couldn’t even find a way to dispute the refund so I just took the win…
  - BikiniPrince 7mo ago
    That explains why it kept changing the estimated received date. It was doing weird things.
m3047 7mo ago
Sometimes you squeeze clay and it comes out the oddest places. There were other stressors last week.https://www.pcmag.com/news/amazon-cloud-services-disrupted-in-uae-after-objects-hit-a-data-center https://www.pcmag.com/news/amazon-cloud-services-disrupted-i...

niwtsol 7mo ago

I believe it is by group - AWS started the weekly operations meeting, effectively every service's oncall from the last week had to attend. Then it grew massive, so they made it optional. Alexa had a similar meeting that tried to replicate what AWS did. A lot of time spent reviewing load tests getting ready for holiday season, prime day, and the superbowl (super bowl ads used to cause crazy TPS spikes for Alexa). And a lot of finger pointing if there was an outage from one team. While it probably did help raise the operational bar, so much time wasted by engineers on busywork/paperwork documenting an error or fix vs improving the actual service.

embedding-shape 7mo ago

> This meeting happens literally every week, and has for years. Feels like the media is making a mountain out of a mole hill here. Are you completely missing the point of the submission? It's not about "Amazon has a mandatory weekly meeting" but about the contents of that specific meeting, about AI-assisted tooling leading to "trends of incidents", having a "large blast radius" and "best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established". No one cares how often the meeting in general is held, or if it's mandatory or not.

skeeter2020 7mo ago
>> Are you completely missing the point of the submission no, and that's what people are noting: the headline deliberately tries to blow this up into a big deal. When did you last see the HN post about Amazon's mandatory meeting to discuss a human-caused outage, or a post mortem? It's not because they don't happen...
- thepasch 7mo ago
  > the headline deliberately tries to blow this up into a big deal I do not understand how “company that runs half the internet has had major recent outages and now explicitly names lax/non-existent LLM usage guidelines as a major reason” can possibly not be a big deal in the midst of an industry-wide hype wave over how the world’s biggest companies now run agent teams shipping 150 pull requests an hour. The chain of events is “AWS has been having a pretty awful time as far as outages go”, and now “result of an operational meeting is that the company will cut down on the use of autonomous AI.” You don’t need CoT-level reasoning to come to the natural conclusion here. If we could, as a species, collectively, stop measuring the relevance of a piece of news proportionally by how much we like hearing it, please?
  - mattgreenrocks 7mo ago
    The defensiveness is almost as interesting as the meeting itself.

cmiles8 7mo ago

The core message of the article is that Amazon has been having issues with AI slop causing operational reliability concerns, and that seems to be 100% accurate.

coredog64 7mo ago
/with AI slop//
inquirerGeneral 7mo ago
[dead]

Clent 7mo ago

Who is the media you're accusing here? This is a twitter post. As far as I can tell they do not work a media company. What is worth being pointed out is how quickly people blame "The Media" for how people use, consume and spread information on social networks.

otterley 7mo ago
The source is not a Twitter post, it's a Financial Times article (that the poster failed to cite).
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

age1mlclg6 7mo ago

What has really happened is that those employees were made into "reverse centaurs": https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/18/tech-ai-bubble-burst-reverse-centaur https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/...

furyofantares 7mo ago

This reply chain is confusing but I'm guessing got merged from another thread that had a different title? Must have as the comments are hours older than OP.

groundzeros2015 7mo ago

It’s always sobering to see a news story about something you have insider perspective on.

rahbert 7mo ago

This is correct. We ran them on Wednesday’s in Alexa. Jessy actually used to come and sit in ours once a quarter or so when he was running AWS.