Edit: I see he's the CTO of an AI company.
For whatever reason, it constantly uses rhetorical reclassification like “That’s not just X. That’s Y.” when it's trying to make a point.
In GPT's own words:
``` ### Why GPT uses it so often:
- It sounds insightful and persuasive with minimal complexity. - It gives an impression of depth by moving from the obvious to the interpretive. - It matches common patterns in blog posts, opinion writing, and analyst reports. ```
I think that last point is probably the most important.
- Constant bulleted lists with snappy, non-punctuated items.
- Single word sentences to emphasize a point ("It was disciplined. Technical. Forensic.")
- The phrasing. e.g. the part about submitting to Reddit: "This response was disproportionate to the activity involved: a first-time technical post, written with precision, submitted to the relevant forum, and not yet visible to any other user." Who on earth says "written with precision" about their own writing?
To be clear, I don't think it's a fabricated account. I also don't think it was a one-shot. OP probably iterated on it with GPT for quite some time.
https://lyons-den.com/CV/David_Lyon_CTO_CV_2025.pdf
EDIT: he has added three(!) separate mentions of the same incident to his résumé
To me personally, calling yourself a CTO with a CV entry that amounts to what an L5 in a FAANG does in a half, is a bit ridiculous. What title would HN recommend for such a position, instead?
Interesting if the whole character was a scam. The current employer is not disclosed in his CV, qualifications are fake (also flagged on Reddit by someone who says they are an ex colleague https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/1m0198c/comment/n3fiwk...) - what else?
No David Lyon in there. It goes straight from Luncheon to Martinez and Lynch to Mackey for Graduates and Candidates, respectively. Page 35
what a weird thing to brag about on your resume. And then he says "case study cited on ... HackerNews" - that's funny!
> It's pretty clearly written by GPT.
is quite funny
Maybe we should be asking why the OP was not able to hear what AWS was telling them. I think there is a fairly troublesome cognitive bias that gets flipped on when people are telling you that you're wrong — especially when all your personal branding and identity seems to be about you being right.
AWS Support is generally ineffective unless you're stuck on something very simple at a higher level of the platform (e.g. misunderstanding an SDK API).
Even with their higher tier support - where you can summon a subject matter expert via Chime almost instantly - they're often clueless, and will confidently pass you misleading or incorrect information just to get you off the line. I've successfully used them as a very expensive rubber ducky, but that's about it.
I sympathize with OP because debugging this was painful, but I'm sorry to say this is sort of just a "you're holding it wrong" situation.
"Failure" != "Bug"
The document is long, and the examples seem contrived, so anyone is free to correct me but as I understand it the lambda didn't crash, after you returned 201, your lambda instance was put to sleep. You aren't guaranteed that any code will remain running after your lambda "ends". I am not sure why AWS Support was unable to communicate this OP.
If you are using Lambda with a function URL, you aren't guaranteed that anything after you return your http response remains running. I believe Lambda has some callbacks/signals you can listen to, to ensure your function properly cleans up before the Lambda is frozen, but if you want the lambda to return as fast as possible it seems you are better off having your service publish to an SQS queue instead.