Uh Oh! Amazon has learned that AI programming may not be reliable!
ComputerWorld.com reported that “AI failures have spread beyond AWS infrastructure to Amazon’s retail storefront. In early March, multiple AI-assisted blunders resulted in four — count ’em four! — major incidents. One led to a six-hour outage.” The March 16, 2026 article entitled “Amazon finds out AI programming isn’t all it’s cracked up to be” (https://www.computerworld.com/article/4145573/amazon-finds-out-ai-programming-isnt-all-its-cracked-up-to-be.html) included these comments:
Publicly, Amazon has pushed back against the narrative that AI agents themselves “caused” the outages. Instead, it has been reframing these failures as classic access-control and process failures. Company spokespeople have repeatedly said the incidents were user error and coincidence, stressing that they have “no evidence” that AI tools make mistakes more often than traditional software developers.
Amazon’s top brass is missing the point. Of course, humans must take the blame. If Amazon executives had a clue, they might recall that back in 1979, an IBM training manual stated, “A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision.” Unfortunately, from the top down, Amazon is insisting that AI be used even when, as has become apparent, it doesn’t work that well.
Amazon’s engineers know that. They’ve told The Guardian that they must use AI and “that we have to go faster, this will make us go faster, and that speed is the number one priority.” The result according to another Amazon employee is “This pressure to use [AI] has resulted in worse quality code, but also just more work for everyone.”
How does the saying go? Oh yeah, “You can have two out of three: fast, cheap, or good.” For Amazon AI may be fast and cheap, but it’s failing to be good.
To get true productivity out of AI, you need to double and triple check its work. This is a lesson that not only Amazon needs to learn, but all businesses suffering from the hallucination that AI is ready to replace programmers.
What do you think?