In a leaked recording, Amazon’s cloud chief tells employees that most developers might stop coding once AI takes over.
It’s possible that software programmers may soon need to learn new skills because artificial intelligence will soon replace many coding tasks.
That’s what the CEO of Amazon Web Services, Matt Garman, said during a June internal fireside chat, according to a recording of the event that Business Insider was able to secure.
“It’s possible that most developers aren’t coding 24 months from now, or in some amount of time — I can’t exactly predict where it is,” stated Garman, who was appointed CEO of AWS 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 said. “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 said.
“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.
Not a dire caution
Recent company layoffs and hiring freezes to direct resources toward AI development have heightened the discourse surrounding the possibility that AI will change or possibly eliminate jobs. Companies may accomplish more with the same number of engineers—or with fewer of these expensive employees—if they use new AI technologies that generate code automatically. Earlier this year, hundreds of workers were let go by AWS.
In Garman’s case, though, he wasn’t threatening to wipe out creators with AI—rather, he was offering guidance. His upbeat tone alluded to additional inventive chances for entrepreneurs. He claimed that AWS was assisting staff members in “continuing to upskill and learn about new technologies” so they could use AI to boost productivity.
“Being a developer in 2025 may be different than what it was as a developer in 2020,” Garman said.
“Undifferentiated heavy lifting” is off the menu
According to Aisha Johnson, an AWS representative, Garman’s remarks highlighted chances for developers to “accomplish more than they do today” with new AI capabilities. She continued by saying there was no sign he anticipated developers’ roles would shrink.
“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 skills and energy on the most innovative work,” Johnson explained in a statement.
“Now, everybody is a programmer”
Garman is hardly the first well-known executive to foresee this kind of shift in developer positions brought about by AI.
Thanks to the introduction of new AI coding aids, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has declared that “everyone is a programmer now”.
According to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, one billion developers will be produced as a result of greater accessibility to AI technologies.
In fact, the former CEO of Stability AI, Emad Mostaque, said there will be “no programmers in five years.”
An innovative AI process
In his address, Garman advised staff members to come up with fresh approaches for integrating AI into their daily tasks.
He mentioned that Smartsheet, a software developer, has integrated artificial intelligence capabilities from Amazon’s Q chatbot into a Slack channel where employees can ask questions on corporate 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,” said Garman.
