Amazon Web Services CEO: AI Will Code For Software Engineers

AI is shaking up industries — and software engineering is no exception.

In a leaked recording of a June fireside chat obtained by Business Insider, Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman reportedly told employees that AI is changing what being a software engineer means —and essentially changes the job description.

“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,” Garman said, adding later that the developer role would look different next year compared to 2020.

^{Matt Garman, CEO of AWS. Photo Credit: Amazon}

Garman took over as CEO of AWS on June 3 after nearly two decades in the division. He joined as a full-time product manager in 2006 when AWS had just three people on its worldwide sales team.

In the leaked chat, Garman said that innovation will replace coding, which means developers will have to think more about the end product.

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“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 reportedly stated.

AWS currently has about 130,000 employees, having laid off several hundred people in April in its sales, marketing, and global services divisions.

Marco Argenti, the CIO of Goldman Sachs, expressed a similar sentiment in April — technical skills alone were not enough to handle AI.

To keep up with the technology, Agenti encouraged future engineers, including his own college-age daughter, to study philosophy in addition to engineering.

Philosophy would give engineers the reasoning abilities and mental framework to keep up with AI, detect hallucinations, and challenge its output, according to Argenti.

Related: Goldman Sachs CIO Says Coders Should Take Philosophy Classes — Here’s Why