Amazon's HR Lead Uses AI Tool to Write 100,000 Lines of Code - 25 Years After She Last Coded (aboutamazon.com)
- Reference: 0185311926
- News link: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/26/08/31/047227/amazons-hr-lead-uses-ai-tool-to-write-100000-lines-of-code---25-years-after-she-last-coded
- Source link: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/workplace/amazon-svp-ai-tools-employees-careers
> We opened the competition to every employee on our team, and within just a few weeks, more than 1,500 people were building. I couldn't believe what they built. One employee built an app that turned a nearly four-hour manual process into a one-second automated check, saving tens of thousands of hours annually. Another made a desktop pet named Momo that keeps your tasks, reminders, and shortcuts a click away.
>
> Since then, I've written over 100,000 lines of code with AI. What I've found is that the more you work with these tools, the more natural the process becomes, and the more you realize they're expanding what you're capable of, not replacing it. You don't need perfection to start. You just need to dive in. When I decided to build the submission app for our team competition, I didn't know how to begin, so I asked our internal AI workplace assistant, called Aza. It pointed me to the right tools and helped me take the first step. From there, I opened Kiro and started building. When you give employees the ability and tools to solve problems themselves, they will surprise you with what they create...
>
> At Amazon, every employee has access to AI tools. Whether someone needs a quick answer, wants to move faster in their day-to-day, or is ready to try building something new, the resources are there. The more people use these tools, the more capable they become with them, and that experience carries forward in their careers... We also want to make it easy for people to build credentials that are recognized across industries. That's why AI training is free for every Amazon employee. Amazon covers the full cost of one AWS AI certification exam per year, with options ranging from foundational AI concepts to professional-level generative AI. Employees can choose the path that fits where they are in their learning journey.
Long-time Slashdot reader [2]theodp notes that 7 months ago Galetti also took to Amazon News to announce the [3]elimination of 16,000 corporate jobs , a move which [4]CNBC noted coincided "with a push to [5]invest heavily in artificial intelligence."
> The job reductions come just a few months after October's layoffs, [6]when 14,000 employees were let go across Amazon's corporate workforce. At the time, the company indicated the cuts would continue in 2026 as it found "additional places we can remove layers."
[1] https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/workplace/amazon-svp-ai-tools-employees-careers
[2] https://www.slashdot.org/~theodp
[3] https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-layoffs-corporate-jan-2026?utm_source=rss
[4] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/28/amazon-layoffs-anti-bureaucracy-ai.html
[5] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/31/tech-ai-google-meta-amazon-microsoft-spend.html
[6] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/28/amazon-layoffs-corporate-workers-ai.html
Pulled Linux from Git;now owning 44m lines of code (Score:3)
I could be an HR Lead as well.
Re:Pulled Linux from Git;now owning 44m lines of c (Score:5, Interesting)
This is an advertisement.
It is remarkably light on detail. She wrote 100,000 lines...of what? We don't know. She's remarkably detailed when she is listing the products and offerings of Amazon. I now know the product names and branding name for their $1billion education benefit program, and their $2.5 billion child training program.
They're trying to appeal to employees, I can't figure out if they want to appeal to their current employees or hire more employees.
Yes we do. (Score:4)
> This is an advertisement. It is remarkably light on detail. She wrote 100,000 lines...of what? We don't know.
How should I put this eloquently.
”On behalf of all of us, I’m gonna fucking go with LinkedIn Job Postings for $500, Alex.”
Re: Pulled Linux from Git;now owning 44m lines of (Score:2)
It doesn't matter what the tech elite do just that they did it. Just like it doesn't matter what we do as long as people can ignore it
Re: Pulled Linux from Git;now owning 44m lines of (Score:2)
I don't care, my interests go beyond sports. Really sports are just entertainment to me. Like professional wrestling. You take it too seriously.
Re: (Score:2)
Raises the question: how redundant is that code.
Which also raises the question: how important is that in our times.
I personally always liked it to factor out common code into "company libraries".
But when the SOAP opera started, I realized that no one is putting the generated interface code into a library. So that everyone can get it from a repository.
Instead the regenerated the interface for every department that wanted access to the service. And: they use a naming schema fitting to the project that wants t
Re:don't think she knows what that word means... (Score:5, Informative)
I think she knows what the word (coding) means. She used to be a software developer. From TFA, in her voice:
> I started my career as a software developer in the transportation industry, building package tracking and international systems. Over nearly two decades, I moved into senior leadership, leading transportation businesses as chief information officer before eventually running the full air and ground networks, from engineering to operations.
> In 2013, I was interviewing at Amazon for a transportation role when the recruiter threw me a curveball: “What would you think about doing a job in HR?” The interviewers had noticed I lit up when I talked about developing people. So, I took the chance. Today I lead the company's global HR organization as senior vice president of People Experience and Technology.
I "created" BIGNUM lines of assembly (Score:3)
from SMALLNUM lines of C and pre-processor code.
When it works well, AI-generated code is almost* just raising things to a higher level of abstraction.
* if only it were just that. Unfortunately, "vibe coding" gives you unreproducible/non-deterministic output, merely raising to the next level of abstraction should give you consistent output. It would be like compiling C code where your headers and libraries change out from under you unpredictably and with every build.
Re: I "created" BIGNUM lines of assembly (Score:4, Informative)
That's why you review and commit the code. Design may sort of be the new code, but only to a point.
Re:The existence of the database endangers us (Score:2)
thats how you end up with 100000 lines of undocumented unmaintainable code that noone knows how it works and what it does.
Re: (Score:3)
We used to call that "outsourcing".
Re: (Score:2)
AI code generators do not generate undocumented code.
Perhaps you should try it once.
Stupid AI hater.
In unrelated news (Score:3)
Amazon's strategic teams, including upper management traditionally from non-technical divisions, have been holding unconfirmed meetings that they can cut *waaay* back on software developer hiring and salaries.
None of it adds up (Score:3)
"One person wrote an app that does 4 hours of work in seconds, saving tens of thousands of hours a year." Uhh, How many fucking people did they have doing this 4 hour task full time? At least five to amke 10,000 hours a year. Nonsense
We're frying the planet... (Score:4)
...to build another Clippy. With vulnerabilities and unmaintainable code. In fact, forget Clippy.
Yay humanity.
Re: (Score:2)
+1 Nice, I'm adding this to my collection of sig quotes.
Lines of code (Score:3)
There have been times in the past where goofing around on my own projects or experiments, I've cranked out many hundreds of lines of code in a day. It's possible that I've exceeded 1000 lines in one day. It usually computed the task at hand at least once, but it wasn't commented, documented, code reviewed, fitted with unit tests, run through any kind of QA process, etc.
On the other hand, I would estimate that when working for a salary and writing code that ran on mission-critical systems, over the course of a project I probably averaged about 10 lines per day. Time spent actually writing the code was dwarfed by time spent negotiating architecture tradeoffs in meetings before even starting, testing the code, documenting it, writing test procedures, debugging issues generated by the test engineers, going through the revision and deployment workflow, reviewing other peoples' code, etc.
Which kind of code is being cranked out from a couple of chatbot prompts? My bet is that it is mostly like the first case I described, and it also probably works at least once.
Before Git Was Invented (Score:1)
That's when she last coded. Before the invention of git.
HR. So easy an IT nerd could do it. (Score:3)
> You don't need perfection to start. You just need to dive in.
Really? Well maybe I should have that attitude walking into an HR department regarding current law then. Especially around handling PII. Let's just 'vibe' my way through mitigating risk and see what happens, shall we?
(Sure. It feels good to find you can do something after 25 years. That doesn't automatically mean you're doing it properly or securely.)
Re: (Score:1)
man, i could not have said this better.
I seriously applaud you
Shame she didn't use it to fix their website (Score:3)
Amazon is a terrible website that makes everything more difficult than it needs to be.
And I would write a thousand lines... (Score:2)
...and I would write a thousand more.
Just to be a man who wrote a thousand lines,
of useless crap with no use at all.
1 *MILLION* lines of code ! (Score:2)
The fact that thinks it is reasonable to meaure her success by the number of lines of code she created makes me question if she is a competent HR manager, let alone was ever a decent programmer.
Does she rank her Software Managers by how many people they hired last week ?
Amazon's HR Lead Feeds Thousands of Employees (Score:2)
By telling the catering company what to put on the menu.
BULLSHIT (Score:1)
subject says it all
It Is Sad (Score:2)
I find it sad that she left coding at all if she cared about it. She says she feels empowered to be able to build again. Then she was dis-empowered by leaving something close to her heart. For what? To be an exec? If she cared about that, she would have felt empowered all these years.
Re: (Score:2)
It is PR work, but it is the wrong kind of PR.
Generating (not writing) 100k lines of mostly throwaway code with an AI isn't an achievement, it is what the older models do by default.