Morning Brew Daily - AI Code Breaks Amazon From Inside & This Startup Wants to Abolish Night

Episode Date: March 11, 2026

Episode 797: Neal and Toby chat about Amazon calling an internal meeting to address a string of AI coding errors. Is this doing more harm than good? Then, Oracle reports another strong quarter but investors are cautious of its commitment to data centers. Also, Fabletics is launching a denim collection as athleisure is falling out of style. Meanwhile, a startup company wants to build huge mirrors to light up the night with more sunlight. Finally, Miami Heat’s Bam Adebayo scores 83 points in a single game. Wowza. Learn more at taxact.com/business-returns Subscribe to Morning Brew Daily for more of the news you need to start your day. Share the show with a friend, and leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here:⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.swap.fm/l/mbd-note⁠⁠⁠  Watch Morning Brew Daily Here:⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Good morning bradley show. I'm Neil Fryman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, the startup that wants to abolish night. Then AI Code is breaking Amazon from the inside out. It's Wednesday, March 11th. Let's ride. Just when you thought the protein craze couldn't get any weirder, it has.

Buffalo Wild Wings announced a chicken wing flavored espresso protein, which contains 10 grams of protein and is infused with Buffalo dry rub, a spice mixture that will also be spread around the rim. The new drink or abomination is rolling out ahead of National Espresso Martini Day on Saturday and will cost 12 bucks. Toby, this sounds great, actually. An espresso protein, what a world we are living in. Rimmed with Buffalo dry rub is a stroke of genius. I am of the mind that if you combine three awesome things, you just get an awesomer thing.

Protein shake, espresso martini, and wings, Naz-A-tois those things, and then head directly to the bathroom because that is not going to sit well. And now a word from our sponsor, Tax Act. Dude, thank goodness I don't have to do my taxes this year. Toby, we've talked about this. You have to do your taxes every year. But there's Tax Act. They help small business owners get their taxes done. Tax Act makes filing easy for small businesses by providing the only online DIY filing software for small businesses.

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only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. Seeful terms at mintmobile.com. Amazon has been generating too much code with AI and it's breaking their systems. Such was the topic of a big meeting called by the company yesterday that took a deep dive into the spate of outages

affecting the business recently. Last week, Amazon's store malfunctioned for a few hours, which the company had attributed to a software code deployment. In December, the company's cost calculator was down for 13 hours when Kiro, its AI coding tool, decided the best way to change the code was to delete and remake the entire system. According to Financial Times, the meeting led to a new policy being put in place. Junior and mid-level engineers now have to get senior engineers to sign off on any AI-assisted

changes. AI shipping code is sort of like having a bowl in an Amazon shop. It's really good at doing a lot, but things are certainly breaking. software in general seems to be getting less reliable. Open AI and Cloud both dropped to 98% uptime during February, which sounds good, but in reality means there have been multiple outages. GitHub, a site that hosts software development projects, has also had more outages in the first quarter of this year than a three-year stretch from 2016 to 2019, according to the X-user-40. Neal, reliability is a key part of Amazon's pitch to customers, especially in its cloud division, which is trying

to fend off challengers like Google in Microsoft. Now it's facing uncomfortable questions around whether AI-assisted code is doing more harm than good. Yeah, Amazon called these high blast radius incidents, which I'm going to adopt in my own vernacular. Here's what they're talking about. On March 2nd, customers on Amazon marketplaces saw incorrect delivery times when adding items to their carts, which led to 120,000 lost orders and about 1.6 million

website errors. that is smaller. That's a smaller blast radius than what happened a couple days later on March 5th. Another outage caused a 99% drop in orders across Amazon's North American marketplaces, which resulted in 6.3 million lost orders. That led to this e-commerce guy, kind of rallying the troops and saying something is not working here, and some of it has to do with AI code. And a lot of people are looking at Amazon and saying, if Amazon, who has one of the most robust engineering systems in the entire world,

if they can't figure out how to safely deploy AI code, then why are other businesses saying that, hey, AI is going to absolutely remake our businesses? And in general, people see software becoming less reliable across industries right now. And the story that people think are being laid out by AI companies right now is that you subsidize AI code generation so that a lot of people, kind of lose the nuts and bolts of how to ship reliable code. And then what you do is you charge people even more money to review that code using AI tools because people looked at a recent

Claude launch from Anthropic called Code Review, which again, it does what a senior engineer would do and go through line by line and make sure your code is actually going to work. They are charging $15 to $25 per poll request, which is very expensive, maybe even more expensive than just having a human do it. So this is sort of the flywheel that they think that, these AI companies are building, make everyone reliant on your product and then make sure they have to use your product to check their code as well and charge them even more for it. Now, in their communications to the press about this meeting and overall AI coding issues, Amazon has been downplaying the impact of broken AI code. It said it was a coincidence that AI

tools were involved in some of these incidents. However, I kind of thinking of this like self-driving cars where it's a new technology that is being adopted rather quickly. and there's going to be more of a microscope on this particular rollout as it would. So even if a human developer caused an outage, which has happened in the past and so did an AI, the AI one is going to be looked at a little more critically or a lot more critically because it is just a new technology that's being adopted. In general, I think back to this PW survey that was conducted recently, they talked to 4,400 chief executives on AI's impact on their bottom line.

Only 12% say that they saw the benefits like increase revenue or decrease spending 55% saw no benefit from AI tools at all. And I'm thinking about Amazon right now, maybe people are seeing negative impact from these tools because of what they do to their businesses. So every time you just see these stories and you see all the massive capital expenditures going into AI, which we'll talk about in our next story, you start to wonder at what point do they need to see results because you are spending a lot of money on building these systems. What a segue, Toby. Let's go to that next story. It is about Oracle, which delivered a more pleasant surprise than when an old friend calls you out of the blue.

The tech giant shares pop 10% after reporting a thumping quarter that relieves some concerns about an AI bubble. Sales jumped 22% on the year, topping expectations, while its revenue backlog grew to $553 billion. The demand for cloud computing for AI training and inferencing continues to grow faster than supply, the company said. The vibes around Oracle have not been good recently. Its value has been cut in more than half since peaking last fall, as investors worried about its soaring debt load and dependence on one partner. Remember that backlog I just mentioned? $300 billion comes from a single company, OpenAI. And there have been commitment issues. On Friday, Bloomberg reported that Open AI and Oracle would not be expanding a planned

data center partnership in Abilene, Texas, which added to longstanding concerns that Oracle had built too many data centers too quickly, all while borrowing too much money. Yesterday's report put some of those fears to rest for now. So be Oracle's earnings were seen as a key litmus test for the entire AI sector, it passed. Yeah, I think the big win here for investors was that the company maintained its outlook for capital expenditure in the current fiscal year at $50 billion. If that number started creeping ever higher, that opens up a bevy of questions about whether this AI build it is going to be worth it.

But the fact that they just maintained it was music to investors' ears. I do want to talk about this Abilene Open AI Data Center problem that Bloomberg was reporting on. There is this tension in the data center market right now because AI chips are being upgraded more quickly than data centers can be built. Think about Nvidia's product release timeline. They are pumping out a new and improved chip. It used to be every two years, but now they've dropped that to every one year. It takes a while to bring a data center online, though, so Oracle orders all these state-of-the-art, top-the-line Blackwell, Nvidia chips. But then, Nvidia goes, hey, we have a new chip coming, Vera Rubin that does way better than Blackwell.

Open AI is like, we want the Vera Rubin chip. We want the newest and latest and greatest technology. Oracle's like, dang, we just filled it all with this latest, an older generation chip. So there is a little bit of a timeline issue where people aren't syncing up when it comes to the latest and greatest technology. So that is one thing that is in the back of people's minds as these data centers are built down. It's like your shoe rack. When you order new sneakers, you don't put them on the one with the old sneakers. You have to get an entire new rack to put the new sneakers on.

There are also another narrative in Oracle's earnings was around just overall SaaSpocalypse. Enterprise software has taken a big licking over the past few months. Oracle is a part of that industry. And so the executives were asked, what do you see yourself? Are you going to get disrupted by AI? And the answer by Oracle executives was pretty funny. They said, yeah, everyone else is getting disrupted, but not us. And Larry Ellison, who is the chairman,

He said, we are quickly adopting AI tools into our systems. So that's why we think we're a disruptor. That's why we think that Saspocalypse applies to others, but not to us. Yeah, it is actually a mirror image of the Amazon story. I'm segueing back into our first story because Oracle is saying, like, hey, we have pared down our workforce. We are seeing efficiency gains from these AI tools. Again, maybe it's more talk than actual execution, but it does seem like there's two

companies that are saying diametrically opposite things. We just saw Oracle stock go up, so maybe it's saying the right things. Moving on, Fabletics, the Athleisure brand that made its name selling comfy yoga pants is launching its first ever denim collection on Thursday. It's yet another sign that the athlete's boom that dominated the pandemic era is losing steam while denim is reclaiming its spot as the casual fit of choice. Fabledic CEO Adam Goldenberg says over a million customers had asked them to make jeans, so it made jeans. And it feels confident listening to customers because they've been behind some of Fabletics' most successful launches.

Case in point, the Scrubs category customers asked for has grown into a $75 million business line. It thinks it can do the same with denim. We do believe denim is on an upswing, Goldenberg said, and there is certainly truth to that. Globally, denim outgrew athlete's 4% to 2% last year as people started wearing real pants again. the Dena market has grown by a whopping 28% since 2020. Neil Jeans are in right now. I think back to Levi's big deal with Beyonce centered around her Cowboy Carter album. Then came American Eagle and Sydney Sweeney and Katzai and Gap.

Now you have athleisure companies getting into the jeans game. I thought it was interesting to hear what Goldenberg said about fashion trends right now because he was talking about the leisure and comfort trend of the pandemic. And obviously that was a big thing. and that at leisure is perhaps on its way down now. But he still said that people want to dress up at the same time. They still want to be comfortable. He said, as consumers are, I would say,

dressing up more than they still wanting to do it in a way that feels good and is more comfortable. And we heard that very loudly from our customers when we were developing denim. Maybe denim threads that needle between, you know, looking presentable, but also feeling okay in your pants. There are some cautionary tales that industry watchers are looking at. One is Lulu Lemon.

Lou Lemon has obviously expanded more outside of its core yoga pant assortments into more outerwear, t-shirts, different lifestyle categories. Some are saying that maybe that's come at the expense of their core business, and Lulu has struggled lately. Also, you look at Nike. Nike moved very heavily into the lifestyle and streetwear style. They kind of started relying on dunks and Air Force Ones to power most of their business. And it worked for a while. Nike sales went up dramatically coming out of the pandemic, but now that growth has stagnated, again, because they feel like they've neglected their core audience of athlete consumers. Fabletics has a very similar business to those two companies.

Are they making a mistake by broadening their horizons when they should just be focusing on their core people? Well, they would say, look at our track record. We have done a very good job at expanding into new categories. In 2020, they launched a menswear line, which they had, it was just women's focus for their entire history. That's now a $300 million business. It counts for 30% of their entire sales. And then the scrub line, which grew to $75 million in sales in just over two years, it's expected to pass $100 million this year. And they say that these new lines are great entry points to get people back into their core offerings. The company says that over 50% of people who buy scrubs within the

first 90 days move into and buy at leisure. Listen to your customers. It's a revolutionary concept, but it turns out it works. All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with a very cool story about space right after this. Now word from today's sponsor, Northwestern Mutual. What's on your mind, Toby? Why don't penguins move somewhere warmer?

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Neil, have you ever had a deal with 10 of something all at once? Yeah, live bees. And let me tell you, big outchies. Well, managing that many campaigns all at once can mean big outchies for those in the agency world. That's why there's Disney campaign manager. With one unified dashboard, it lets you launch and manage every client campaign in one place with reporting that highlights insights fast. Built-in optimization feeds those insights back into future planning,

helping agencies deliver strong results. Get started today at Disneycampaignmanager.com. That's Disneycampaign manager.com. How's this for an out there business idea? A startup wants to turn night into day by launching 50,000 huge mirrors into space that will reflect sunlight onto areas of the earth where it's nighttime.

It feels like science fiction, but it could become a reality. The company, named Reflect Orbital, has applied to the FCC for its first prototype satellite and could soon receive approval, according to the New York Times. Everyone knows the night is dark and full of terrors, but it's also an economic drag. When it's dark out, solar farms can't function. Actual farms have to shut down, and search and rescue operations, life or death scenarios are also hindered.

Reflect Orbital wants to change that with a special focus on juicing clean energy generation. CEO Ben-Noak told the Times, we're trying to build something that could replace fossil fuels and really power everything. It is safe to say that not everyone is as optimistic. Scientists worry about the impact of giant space mirrors on confused animals whose breeding hibernation and migration activities are all determined by standard celestial motions. Astronomers say the reflections will hurt their work mapping the cosmos, and even others raise concerns about the damage to humans trying to get some shut-eye.

Light as faint as a full moon has been documented to change human sleep patterns. Toby, turns out when he turned night and today there are some secondary consequences, but it is provocative. This has been a provocative idea that has been around for a long time. you go back to 1977, a German-born rocket engineer proposed space mirrors for very similar reasons to prevent crop freezes to illuminate disaster-struck areas, which is a very similar story to what this startup is telling. In 1993, a Russian satellite actually carrying a mirror did make it up to orbit to try to reflect sunlight across a part of the world to jack up daylight hours in Arctic

Siberia. So definitely something that's been in the back of humanity's mind for a lot of long time. Yet there is a lot of environmental claims. There's a lot of people saying that this is just a really bad idea, but I actually just want to dig into the feasibility of it in the math itself. Michael Brown, who's an astronomer in Australia, calculated that the sunlight from one satellite would be spread out over 18 square miles, not the three square miles that maybe the startup is saying, basically saying that the photons are going to scatter to such an extent that a solar panel would only receive one 140,000th of the rate of sun that you would get at midday. So it's just not a feasible plan because our atmosphere scatters the light too quickly.

Right. It's just not powerful enough to get solar powers doing anything of productive use. Let's go over the plan, though, because they're applying to the FCC. The FCC could well approve this. So they are going to send up, if it gets approved, a satellite, roughly the size of a dorm fridge. And then once it's in space about 400 miles up, it is going to unfurl a square mirror that's nearly 60 feet wide. Now, this prototype is actually smaller than the eventual bigger satellites that they want to launch.

Those are nearly 180 feet wide. And the timeline, which of course is going to be hit, is that by 2035, they are going to be sending up 50,000 satellites that will deploy these massive mirrors to beam light onto areas of the earth that are dark. and hopefully they're going to get customers like farms or industrial sites that just want a little more light, or maybe cities that don't have street lights, that's another one of their customers they're going after. Yeah, the business model is very interesting. They want to price it basically like a power company, like a business or a municipality could pay for access to the service.

It would be $5,000 an hour from the light of one mirror, or if you sign an annual contract, that price goes down a little bit. If you want on-demand light, that is going to cost you a little bit more money, maybe for something like a rescue operation. I do just think about sleep patterns, though, because that's that of the light of a single full moon can alter sleep patterns. Now we're talking about beaming the full sun onto areas. That is going to affect humans, but also animals as well. So I think the environmental contingent is going to have a lot to say about this. Now, even the skeptics of this company say there might be one very promised. an exciting use case, and that is on the moon. The moon has two-week-long nights. It doesn't have

the atmosphere that scatters the sun's rays, so it could be a feasible plan on the moon and not Earth. We just got to get there first. Right. Okay, let's sprint to the finish with some final headlines. Texas has claimed another corporate transplant from the Northeast, Exxon Mobile. The energy giant is planning to move its legal home to Texas from New Jersey, where it has been incorporated since 1882, joining several of the United States. major companies who've recently relocated to the more business-friendly Lone Star State. Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, CEO Darren Woods said, quote, Texas is already our operating home, and we think it makes sense to make it our legal home, adding that the move was also about

protecting the company from frivolous shareholder lawsuits. It is another win for Texas, which has tried to position itself as an oasis for companies that have incorporated in northern states, most commonly Delaware. Recently, Tesla and Coinbase reincorporated in Texas, while Exxon's rival Chevron moved its HQ from California to Texas. Yeah, Texas, low regulations, low taxes. They have a new stock exchange now. And also they have rules that make it harder for those small shareholders to file proposals. In Texas right now, you need to own at least a million dollars in stock in order to file some of these headache-inducing proposals.

So it is just a better opportunity for someone like Exxon Mobile to dodge some of these activism angles. Exxon has tried to get around this for a long time. It sued in 2024 to block climate-related shareholder proposals. CEO Darren Woods openly said that activist investors have weaponized the current system. So it is all downstream of trying to avoid some of these lawsuits. Moving on, yesterday Meta acquired Maltzbook, the social network built for AI agents for an undisclosed sum. Moldbook launched in late January as a third space for AI agents, a place where your AI assistant can mingle and talk with other AI assistants.

In the sign of the Times, notebook was largely built by founder Matt Silik's personal AI assistant, he named Claude Claudeberg. There's also some classic tech land grab drama here. Last month, Open AI hired OpenClaas creator and is now open sourcing it. So meta grabbed the social layer while Open AI grabbed the infrastructure one.

Neil, a social network for bots talking to bots. Sounds a little like LinkedIn, TBAH. Well, it is unclear what Facebook is actually buying because researchers have looked into this particular social network after it went viral a few months ago. And they found that actually it's mostly smoke and mirrors. A lot of the bot activity in some of the more salacious posts, some of the more big picture scheming things that people were mostly alarmed about was actually orchestrated by humans behind the scenes. So it's very unclear what Mark Zuckerberg is getting with MULPOOK. But hey, maybe this is the plan to revive Facebook. Just turn it over to the boss.

I think a lot of people are saying, Mark is showing that there's only a finite amount of social applications that can ever be invented. And when a new novel one comes up, you might as well get ahead of it because once someone nails it, there's not a lot of competition as, you know, meta has shown. So anytime there's even a whisper of potentially a new form of social media, maybe one that is dominated by AI bots, I don't know where, you know, the ad dollars are going to be coming into that, but maybe you're selling ads to AI bots eventually. They're just like, might as well get ahead of it. Even if it's nothing, even if it's smoke and mirrors, we might as well get ahead of the curve

right now. Up next, if you're looking for more ways to express yourself, new emoji, emojis are coming to your phone. This week, iOS 26.4 beta rolled out for developers and with it a fresh suite of emoji that'll be available to the public later this month. Here's what's new. Ballet dancers, Fight Cloud, Hairy creature, landslide, Orca, trombone treasure chest, and soon to be a staple of your group chat, distorted face.

You're going to want to look up what this looks like. It is the next great emoji reaction. Besides distorted face, Harry Creature was the other big talker because it's basically Bigfoot, but for some reason Apple didn't want to call it that. This is a tough story to do on a podcast because you really do have to see the emojis themselves. But the first person who drops a distorted face in their group chat is going to go viral. Have you heard of being the Adam Schefter of a group chat? Have you heard of this phenomenon?

No, I've not. So Adam Schefter is the reporter who breaks all the NFL trade. So people are saying that I'm the Adam Schefter of my group chat. I'm the one who monitors situation brings new stuff. So if you are the first one to bring these new emojis to your group chat, I think you are going to get a lot of thumbs up, a lot of likes. Although I'm not sure if they actually processed if you haven't upgraded your phone because it comes out with a new iOS.

So maybe disregard everything I said because you're just going to be sending those little question mark things. All that being said, check out the distorted phase because it's just perfect for a lot of situations. I can't wait to stick the trombone on you when you tell a bad joke. That's what I'm excited about. That stuff. All right. Finally, you are not as good at your job as Bam, Atabio is at his. Now, Miami Heat Star just dropped 83 points last night, the second most ever in an NBA game, surpassing Kobe Bryant's 81 and trailing only Wilk Chamberlain's 100-point effort. Atabio started off hot with 30 points in the first quarter against the hapless Washington Wizards, but things got sort of weird from there.

In the second half, as it became apparent that the game was in hand, the heat started to blatantly stat pad for BAM. That meant intentionally fouling while up over 20 points to stop the clock to get more possessions. Atabio also attempted 43 free throws, the most ever in the game. Many are pointing to the free throw total and the fact that he shot under 50% from the field, as evidence that this was not an ethical balling performance. Still, Neil, 83 points. I hope you didn't bet the under.

I did not. Bam had 43 free throws. Kobe in his 81 point game had 20 free throws. This is not a highlight reel. You're going to go back and watch because it is literally just him shooting free throws for mostly the entire game. And compare that to Kobe's, which you absolutely go back and watch on YouTube all the time because he's out there shooting jumpers and just being actually Kobe.

So it's very interesting how this will be perceived going forward because it is an absurd amount of points second most ever. But at the same time, about half of them came from him just shooting free throws. Although I did watch the tape because, you know, I'm doing my journalistic duty here. The fouls were fouls. Like they were not tick-tack calls that the refs were just giving to them. He was kind of getting hacked a little bit. And a lot of people went back and said like, hey, in Wilts' 100-point game,

Philly was letting the Knicks score very quickly. the four so they could get the ball back to feed Wilts Chamberlain. Kobe took 13 of the last 17 field goals attempted by the Lakers. So there's no ethical performances when it comes to these massive points totals. Just sit back and enjoy like the outlier performance that we just got.

I'll enjoy it. All I'll say is that we all remember where we were when Kobe put up 81. I don't think I'm going to remember anything about what happened when Bam had a bio put up 83. That's true. Okay, that is all the time we have. Thanks for starting your morning with us and have a wonderful Wednesday. If you'd like to reach us,

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