↓ Skip to main content
alper.nl

·96 words
English Software Engineering

how Amazon’s traditional viciously customer-focused approach to development was a poor match for the research-style work that was required for developing AI

Being able to match R&D type work with product work is mystifying for many organizations. Not hard to see how they failed at this, taking into account all the other organizational issues listed in this post.

What is even more telling is that this post about AI is mostly about Alexa, but Amazon also mostly missed the boat on AI compute and GPUs (which could be seen in their severe supply side limitations).

https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/06/08/ai-at-amazon-a-case-study-of-brittleness/

Alper Cugun
Author
Alper Cugun

Related

·95 words
English Software Engineering Strategy
No individual in the organization will ever have an accurate mental model about how the entire system works. To put it simply: It’s the stuff we don’t know that bites us. There’s always stuff we don’t know.

·180 words
English Software Engineering
I think I have to disagree with this post and call it mostly wishful thinking. I haven’t seen that much adoption of vibecoding in Rust. Most of the data points I’m looking at point towards Go being the clear leader here with its low expressiveness, quick compilation and rather basic type system.

·78 words
English Software Engineering
The goal is not to embed Django inside another system, but to demonstrate that Django ORM can already act as a lightweight, standalone data access layer.