In a recently leaked “fireside chat,” Matt Garman, the head of Amazon Web Services (AWS), hinted at a future where AI could dramatically reshape the role of human developers.
“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 stated, painting a future where traditional coding might no longer be the primary skillset for developers.
These comments come after a few organizational changes at AWS. Just a month after overseeing hundreds of job cuts in April, Garman was promoted to CEO, positioning him to lead the company through this period of transformation.
“Coding is just kind of like the language that we talk to computers. It’s not necessarily the skill in and of itself. The skill in and of itself is like, how do I innovate? How do I go build something interesting for my end users to use?”, he said.
Garman further emphasized that the role of developers could look very different in the near future. “Being a developer in 2025 may be different than what it was as a developer in 2020,” he added.
While AWS has maintained that Garman’s comments were not intended as a “warning,” the implications are clear. The rise of AI is fueling concerns about job automation, particularly in fields like programming and software engineering. The extent to which AI will replace these roles, however, remains a subject of debate and uncertainty.
“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 writing code,” Garman pointed out.
This suggests that future developers may need to prioritize understanding customer needs and innovating user-centric solutions over the traditional task of writing code.
In response to the leaked audio, an AWS spokesperson clarified that Garman was not issuing a warning but was instead discussing how developers can “accomplish more than they do today.”
“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,” the spokesperson added.
However, what this “innovative work” will entail remains to be seen, as the role of developers continues.