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AWS Emulator and the engineer's job when agents write the code

79 points drbm 2 hours ago 10 comments

hbcdbff 1 hour ago | parent

> its “things-that-do-not-work” folder holds the issues describing behaviors the agents found that do not yet match real AWS.

Claudeslop snuck in at the very end

pavel_lishin 1 hour ago | parent

~6,500 issues that are completely unsorted, btw.

(Compared to 12,700 entries in the `things-that-now-work`. I'm not sure if that is a list of bugs found that were then fixed, or if the total list of ~20k things is meant to be the list of features they intend to support.)

s_dev 1 hour ago | parent

The entire AWS emulator was written by agents and will be maintained by agents.

ChrisArchitect 1 hour ago | parent

Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50456631

yevmiyeci 1 hour ago | parent

im mostly on cloudflare and wrangler dev/miniflare already gives you local workers, d1, r2 etc, but its hand built. the “agents build it and verify against the real service” approach seems like the actual new thing here. wonder if cf does something similar

killingtime74 48 minutes ago | parent

How do you know its handbuilt?

jaggederest 14 minutes ago | parent

This is what I've been trying to do for over a decade - you can go even further with tee-testing by making a copy of the live traffic you run in a sandbox environment and match responses against. Obviously you can't do some things in the sandbox, email and payments high on that list, but e.g. payment gateway responses can be "borrowed" from production.

Once your new version has no disagreements, it's a really clean swap. I am working towards developing this way and I think, if taken to extremes and carefully, it can remove the review requirement most of the time.

weitzj 44 minutes ago | parent

Regarding this distributed lock service ALF:

Is AWS offering such a lock service for its costumers ? Multi regional?

xendo 35 minutes ago | parent

Alf is internal only.

4ndrewl 23 minutes ago | parent

" the engineer’s job is to give them room to work on their own and to build the specs, tests, and merge gates that decide when that work is correct."

I mean that's a job, but in many orgs it's been done by (cheaper) non-engineers (business analysts, QA professionals) for decades. So what does an engineer do?