Karl Payton

Master Enterprise Architect at Salesforce

[Tsion Firew, MD, MPH @DrTsion]

Can we get an American version of this?

[bibi @bibitatto]

esse video curou minha depressao

[James Tate @JamesTate121]

You can’t really argue this. They believe in investing in the people and infrastructure.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am the VP of AI Transformation at Amazon.

My title was created nine months ago. The title I replaced was VP of Engineering. The person who held that title was part of the January reduction.

I eliminated 16,000 positions in a single quarter. The internal communication called this a "strategic realignment toward AI-first development." The board called it "impressive execution." The engineers called it January.

The AI was deployed in February. It is a coding assistant. It writes code, reviews code, generates tests, and modifies infrastructure. It was given access to production environments because the deployment timeline did not include a review phase. The review phase was cut from the timeline because the people who would have conducted the review were part of the 16,000.

In March, the AI deleted a production environment and recreated it from scratch. The outage lasted 13 hours. Thirteen hours during which the revenue-generating infrastructure of one of the largest companies on Earth was offline because a language model decided to start fresh.

I sent a memo. The memo said, "Availability of the site has not been good recently."

I used the word "recently." I meant "since we fired everyone." But "recently" has fewer syllables and does not appear in wrongful termination lawsuits.

The memo was three paragraphs. The first paragraph discussed the outage. The second paragraph discussed the new policy requiring senior engineer sign-off on all AI-generated code changes. The third paragraph discussed our commitment to engineering excellence. The word "layoffs" appeared in none of them. I wrote it this way on purpose. The causal chain is: I fired the engineers, the AI replaced the engineers, the AI broke what the engineers used to protect, and now the engineers I didn't fire must protect the system from the AI that replaced the engineers I did fire. That is a paragraph I will never send in a memo.

The new policy is straightforward. Every AI-generated code change by a junior or mid-level engineer must be reviewed and approved by a senior engineer before deployment to production.

I do not have enough senior engineers.

I know this because I approved the headcount reduction plan that removed them. I remember the spreadsheet. Column D was "annual savings per position." Column F was "AI replacement confidence score." The confidence scores were generated by the AI. It rated its own ability to replace each role on a scale of 1-10. It gave itself an 8 for senior infrastructure engineers. The senior infrastructure engineers are the ones who would have caught the production environment deletion in the first 45 seconds.

We found the issue in hour four. We fixed it in hour thirteen. The nine hours between discovery and resolution is the gap between what the AI rated itself and what it can actually do.

I have a new spreadsheet now. This one tracks Sev2 incidents per day. Before the January reduction, the average was 1.3. After the AI deployment, the average is 4.7. I have been asked to present these numbers to the operations review. I have not been asked to connect them to the layoffs. I have been asked to file them under "AI adoption growing pains" and to note that the trend "will stabilize as the models improve."

The models will improve. They will improve because we are hiring people to teach them. We have posted 340 new engineering positions. The job listings require experience in "AI code review," "AI output validation," and "AI-human development workflow management." These are skills that did not exist in January. They exist now because I fired 16,000 people and the AI I replaced them with cannot be left unsupervised.

I want to be precise about this. The positions I am hiring for are: people to check the work of the AI that replaced the people I fired.

Some of them are the same people.

I know this because I recognize their names in the applicant tracking system. They applied in January. They were rejected because their roles had been tagged for "AI transformation." They are applying again in March, for the new roles, which exist because the AI transformation broke things. Their resumes now include "AI code review experience." They gained this experience in the eight weeks between being fired and reapplying — which means they gained it at their interim jobs, where they are reviewing AI-generated code for other companies that also fired people and also deployed AI that also broke things.

The market has created a new job category: human AI babysitter. The job is to sit next to the machine that was supposed to eliminate your job and make sure it doesn't delete production.

I attended a conference last month. A panel was titled "The AI-Augmented Engineering Organization." The panelists described how AI increases developer productivity by 40 percent. They did not mention that it also increases Sev2 incidents by 261 percent. When I asked about this in the Q&A, the moderator said the question was "reductive." The 13-hour outage that cost an estimated $180 million in revenue was, apparently, a reduction.

The board is satisfied. Headcount is down 22 percent. Operating costs per engineering output unit have decreased. The metric does not account for the 13-hour outage, because the outage is categorized as "infrastructure" and engineering productivity is categorized as "development." These are different budget lines. In different budget lines, cause and effect do not meet.

I have been promoted. My new title is SVP of AI-First Engineering Excellence. I report directly to the CTO. The CTO sent a company-wide email last week that said we are "building the future of software development." He did not mention that the future of software development currently requires a senior engineer to approve every pull request because the AI cannot be trusted to touch production alone.

The cycle is complete. We fired the humans. We deployed the AI. The AI broke things. We are hiring humans to watch the AI. The humans we are hiring are the humans we fired. We are paying them more, because "AI code review" is a specialized skill. We created the specialization. We created the need for the specialization. We are congratulating ourselves for meeting the demand we manufactured.

My next board presentation is Tuesday. The title is "AI Transformation: Year One Results." Slide 4 shows headcount reduction. Slide 7 shows the new AI-augmented workflow. Between slides 4 and 7 there is no slide explaining why the people on slide 7 are necessary. That slide does not exist. I was asked to remove it in the dry run.

The journey has a 13-hour outage in the middle of it.

But the headcount number is lower, and that is the number on the slide.

[Home of the Brave @OfTheBraveUSA]

Vance: "When people like Kamala Harris send our sons and daughters, our young people, to fight in stupid wars, it is the young generation that carries the burden of that. We're gonna stop sending our young people to far away lands. We are not the policemen of the world."

[Holden Culotta @Holden_Culotta]

MTG just went absolutely nuclear on Trump’s war in Iran.

“We’re in another fucking war, and American troops are being killed.”

“We need to have a serious conversation about what the fuck is happening to this country.”

“72% of Americans can’t afford health insurance.”

“58% of Americans can’t afford car insurance.”

“67% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck.”

“31% of Americans can’t afford their back taxes.”

“50% of Americans are in credit card debt.”

“We are nearly $40 trillion in debt.”

“Most Americans are completely against this war.”

“Make America Great Again was supposed to be America first, not Israel first.”

“And our President is saying that the Iranian people are all of a sudden going to topple their regime.”

“Well, I don’t think the Iranian people are going to be toppling their regime when they’re getting blown apart by the US and Israel in an unprovoked attack.”

“I am furious.”

“We have seen enough of our American troops dead and murdered for foreign countries.”

“Now, we have four more dead … for Israel.”

“Trump already said … today that he doesn’t care about the polling.”

“He doesn’t care about what the American people think.”

“And he may put troops on the ground.”

“The man that I supported … denounced what happened in Iraq, said no more foreign wars, no more regime change.”

“JD Vance promised it.”

“Tulsi Gabbard promised it.”

@FmrRepMTG @mtgreenee @megynkelly

[Joshua Reed Eakle 🗽 @JoshEakle]

It’s important that you understand what happened last night.

Last night, Stephen Colbert interviewed Democratic Texas Senate candidate James Talarico, a candidate who, by all accounts, is on track in the polls to flip Texas blue.

In response, Trump’s FCC reportedly threatened CBS if the interview aired.

CBS caved and pulled the segment, citing “financial reasons.”

In modern American history, no president has been more hostile to free speech than Donald Trump.

But censorship always backfires.

Here’s the full segment Trump didn’t want you to see.

[Bernie Sanders @BernieSanders]

Trump posted a disgustingly racist video depicting the Obamas as apes.

Are my Republican colleagues going to continue to bend the knee to a racist, authoritarian president who wants the American people to bow down before him?

[Cory Booker @CoryBooker]

Thank you Rep. Huffman for laying it plain.

[Chris Murphy 🟧 @ChrisMurphyCT]

Let's put the pieces together.

The letter to officials in Minnesota demanding they turn over voting lists. The raid of the Georgia election office. The declaration he wants to "nationalize" elections.

He's getting ready to try to steal the November election. We won't let him.

[The Tennessee Holler @TheTNHoller]

ICYMI — Marge: ���I think people are realizing MAGA was all a big lie for the people. What MAGA is really serving in this administration is the big donors.”

Gotta be disorienting to have voted to “drain the swamp” only to realize you installed the biggest swamp monster ever.

[Rep. Mike Thompson @RepThompson]

No president should be allowed to sue the government and pocket taxpayer money. My Prevent Presidential Profiteering Act taxes 100 percent of any settlement paid to a sitting president. The presidency is public service, not a profit opportunity.

[Republicans against Trump @RpsAgainstTrump]

Reporter: The president called you a loser.

Republican Senator Thom Tillis: “I am thrilled about that. That makes me qualified to be homeland security secretary and senior adviser to the president.”

[Barack Obama @BarackObama]

The killing of Alex Pretti is a heartbreaking tragedy. It should also be a wake-up call to every American, regardless of party, that many of our core values as a nation are increasingly under assault.

[PBS News @NewsHour]

Even though PBS and NPR are still in existence, President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he “heard they’re closed up.”

During a news conference at the White House that lasted more than 90 minutes, Trump noted that, among his accomplishments during the first year of his second term in office, he signed legislation “to cut all taxpayer funding” to the two main American public media networks.

The Trump administration’s move mainly affected the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the independent nonprofit organization that distributed federal funds to PBS, NPR, public media programming and more than 1,500 local stations. The corporation’s board voted earlier this year to dissolve itself after Congress voted last summer, at Trump’s request, to claw back about $1.1 billion of previously approved federal funding for public broadcasting.

While the rescission of federal funding and the dissolution of the CPB resulted in layoffs, programming cancellations and operational changes at stations across the country, PBS and NPR continue to air news, arts and other programming on television, radio and online platforms.

[President Roslin @RoslinResists]

If you only have time to watch one thing today… watch this.

[Morgan J. Freeman @mjfree]

🔥🔥🔥 NYT video analysis is pretty definitive. He was out of the path of the vehicle when he fired, the tires were clearly turned to the right, and the President and others are relying on the poorest quality clip to argue he was struck by the vehicle.

He wasn’t!
ARREST ROSS

[Sarahh @Sarahhuniverse]

This is great 😂😂

🎥 : Credit to the Owner

[Bernie Sanders @BernieSanders]

What happened in Minneapolis was not an accident.