Interview Steve Tarcza, director of Amazon Stores, says his team — StoreGen — exists to help the retail giant's developers move faster and cut friction. But despite the AI mandate, one principle is non-negotiable: nothing ships without a human checking it first.We can't get to the point where we don't have more junior engineers coming in. We have to continue to grow the talent. We can't end up in a spot where there are not folks to maintain these systems ...
The unit focuses not on AWS customers, but on Amazon's internal development teams for its mammoth retail site and operations.Tarcza spoke to us at the AWS London Summit last week, we met him immediately following the keynote at which Alison Kay, VP and managing director UK and Ireland, told attendees that AI technology feels "like magic." Kay cited as an example how the inference engine behind Bedrock, a generative AI service, was rebuilt in 76 days by six engineers, thanks to using the Kiro agentic coding service."While the engineers slept, the agents kept building," she said, describing how they "wrote code, tested it, found bugs, fixed them, and deployed it around the clock."
The Register suggested to Tarcza that there is some trepidation and worry about this, thanks to well-known security and reliability issues with AI. What issues have his team encountered?"It's the things everybody knows about," he tells us. "It's the hallucinations, it's keeping it within the guardrails." There are cases, he said, where the AI is "even doing work that you didn't ask it to, going further than you wanted to."He is an enthusiast for spec-driven development, which was the key feature of Kiro when it was first previewed in July 2025, the idea being that the AI generates a set of tasks for refinement and approval before writing any code.Does spec-driven development solve problems like hallucination and prompt injection? "No," says Tarcza. "It reduces it at best. And even then, there are cases where it still does go beyond the specification."Kiro was possibly involved in a service outage last year though this was officially denied, with the incident blamed on an employee error.
