Amazon
Software engineers may have to develop other skills soon as artificial intelligence takes over many coding tasks.
That's according to Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman, who shared his thoughts during an internal fireside chat held in June, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by Business Insider.
"If you go forward 24 months from now, or some amount of time — I can't exactly predict where it is — it's possible that most developers are not coding," said Garman, who became AWS CEO in June.
"Coding is just kind of like the language that we talk to computers. It's not necessarily the skill in and of itself," the executive explained. "The skill in and of itself is like, how do I innovate? How do I go build something that's interesting for my end users to use?"
This means the job of a software developer will change, Garman added.
"It just means that each of us has to get more in tune with what our customers need and what the actual end thing is that we're going to try to go build because that's going to be more and more of what the work is as opposed to sitting down and actually writing code," he said.
Talk of AI changing and even eliminating jobs has intensified lately as companies lay off employees or stop hiring to shift resources toward AI development. New AI tools that automatically generate code can help companies do more with the same number of engineers, or fewer of these pricey employees. AWS laid off hundreds of employees earlier this year.
In Garman's case, he was sharing advice, rather than issuing a dire warning that developers will go extinct because of AI. His tone was optimistic, suggesting more creative opportunities for developers. He said AWS is helping employees "continue to upskill and learn about new technologies" to increase their productivity with the help of AI.
"Being a developer in 2025 may be different than what it was as a developer in 2020," Garman added.
AWS spokesperson Aisha Johnson told BI that Garman's comments conveyed opportunities for developers to "accomplish more than they do today" with new AI tools. There was no indication that he expected a decline in the role of developers, she added.
"Matt articulated a vision for how AWS will continue to remove undifferentiated heavy lifting from the developer experience so that builders can focus more of their skill and energy on the most innovative work," Johnson said in a statement.
Garman isn't the first high-profile executive to predict this type of AI-driven change in developer jobs.
Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang has said that "everyone is a programmer now" because of new AI coding assistants.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that easier access to AI technologies will create 1 billion developers in the future.
Stability AI's former CEO Emad Mostaque even predicted there will be "no programmers in five years."
During Garman's talk, he told employees to rethink the way they work by finding new ways to incorporate AI into their workflow.
For instance, he said software maker Smartsheet recently embedded AI features from Amazon's Q chatbot into a Slack channel that answers employee questions about internal policies and documentation.
"A lot of times we think about customers, which is great, but I'd also encourage everybody internally to think about how you are just completely changing what you're doing," Garman said.
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