Amazon's AI boom is creating mess of duplicate tools and data inside the company

CharlieDigital

I have found this at a different scale in our company: agents keep writing the same private static utility methods over and over again without checking for it in existing code. Sometimes, I'll catch it writing the same logic 2x in the same PR (recent example: conversion of MIME type to extension for images). At our scale, it is still possible to catch this and have these pulled out or use existing ones. I've been mulling whether microservices make more sense now as isolation boundaries for teams. If a team duplicates a capability internally within that boundary, is it a big deal? Not clear to me.

minimally

http://archive.today/06p42

LeCompteSftware

Brooks's Law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month With the obvious preface of "thoughtlessly adding." Of course it's not a real law, it's a tongue-in-cheek observation about how things have tended to go wrong empirically, and highlights the unique complexity of adding manpower to software vs. physical industry. Regardless, it has been endlessly frustrating for people to push AI/agentic development by highlighting short-term productivity, without making any real attempt to reconcile with these serious long-term technical management problems. Just apply a thick daub of Claude concealer, and ship. Maybe people are right about the short-term productivity making it worthwhile. I don't know, and you don't either: not enough time has elapsed to falsify anything. But it sure seems like Fred Brooks was correct about the long-term technical management problems: adding Claudes to a late C compiler makes it later. The resulting compiler has nearly reached the limits of Opus’s abilities. I tried (hard!) to fix several of the above limitations but wasn’t fully successful. New features and bugfixes frequently broke existing functionality. https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-c-compiler

cowartc

This is a symptom of the problem. The real issue is that everyone is running off and building their own thing without tying back to a north star and coordinating. I've seen this play out before in a F200. Tooling proliferation resolves itself once everything is driving towards the same goal and owns it. Without that, you're just duplicating symptoms.

DonsDiscountGas

It's worth considering whether that's really a problem. With AI, It's easier to reinvent the wheel 1000 times then get 1000 people together and agree on requirements (which most people would then modify).

odux

Duplicate tools and data within Amazon is as old as Amazon. It is even mentioned in the Leadership Principles or related documents somewhere.

socratic_weeb

Lots of copium on this thread. The reality is that this iteration of AI technology is mostly crap. Moreover, expensive crap. The bubble is popping, sorry.

lqstuart

My company has four (4) vibe-coded dashboards to monitor AI tool usage. We have made no revenue, let alone profit from any AI feature. However, some curiously under qualified people have been hired into new “AI” themed roles with seven or eight figure comp, and we seem to be preparing for major layoffs in the next 30-60 days. Presumably those new roles will be safe.

recursivecaveat

I'm definitely seeing an ongoing train of dashboards, chatbots, and digests. Some of it is definitely self-promotion. I do think though that a lot of people don't realize how much continuous advocacy and support you have to provide for a tool to gain mind share. I've had people message me months after I would have assume that they integrated a tool into their workflow, asking after points of confusion getting started. They love it, super helpful, and then they come back with new bugs you have to triage, new feature requests to support their work. People have limited time and energy, and they will not invest unless you are out pounding the pavement for your tool.