Software developers may soon need to learn new skills as artificial intelligence (AI) takes over many programming tasks. At least, that’s what Matt Garman thinks. The head of Amazon Web Services (AWS) pondered the subject during an internal conversation in June, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by Business Insider. “If you fast-forward 24 months or some period of time — I can’t predict exactly when that will be — it’s likely that most developers don’t code,” the industrial engineer explained shortly after taking over as CEO. “Coding is like the language that we use to communicate with computers.” However, it’s not necessarily the human ability itself that’s in demand. It’s the innovation that lies there.
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“How do I build something that will be interesting to the end users?” Garman gave an example, according to the report. Current technological advances mean that the job of a programmer will change. The executive stressed that “each of us” must be more attuned to “what our customers need and what the actual end product we’re trying to build.” Because that will increasingly be the core of human work in the future. Sitting down and actually writing code will become less important.
The debate over whether generative AI in particular is changing jobs or costing jobs has been gathering momentum for some time. AI tools like ChatGPT or Gemini can generate code automatically, potentially helping companies do more with the same or even fewer engineers and IT experts. Amazon’s cloud division AWS itself laid off hundreds of employees earlier this year. Consultants from McKinsey, IDC, and Bain & Company see the greatest potential for generative AI in the IT sector in the automated development of new application software. Critics counter: Code agents can quickly generate source code, but they can’t understand errors or the meaning of lines.
AI as a job killer for programmers?
Garman didn’t want to issue a dire warning about the extinction of programmers, but he did want to offer advice, Business Insider summarizes the speech. His tone was optimistic. The Amazon veteran noted that AI is opening up more creative possibilities for developers. AWS is helping employees “educate themselves and learn new techniques” to increase their productivity using AI. Coding in 2025 is likely to be radically different than it was in 2020.
This post sparked a lively discussion on Reddit. Jarman apparently wanted to express the need for “increased abstraction in software development,” as one user explained. Another understood the entrepreneur to mean “that being a programmer is not just about using syntax, but much more.” He referred to it as “moving from machine code to a higher-level language,” which makes the work of a software developer, with a wide range of skills and abilities, more important. Another user agrees with Turing Award winner Yann LeCun, who believes that all repetitive and predictable tasks in the software world have already been automated without AI, for example via low/no-code solutions. Thus, the future tasks of programmers are associated with a certain novelty and unpredictability, “for which AI is not suitable in the near future.”
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