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During a leaked "fireside chat," the head of Amazon Web Services (AWS) Matt Garman suggested that in as little as two years, human developers may need to learn different skills to make way for artificial intelligence coders.
"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," he exclaimed in audio leaked to Business Insider.
Just a month after overseeing hundreds of AWS job cuts in April, Garman was promoted to CEO. With that pedigree of rapid ascension amid layoffs, he seems perfectly poised to deliver that kind of pep talk to his assembled employees.
"Coding is just kind of like the language that we talk to computers. It's not necessarily the skill in and of itself," the CEO 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?"
"Being a developer in 2025 may be different than what it was as a developer in 2020," Garman added.
While AWS insists that Garman wasn't issuing a "warning," his language still comes across as a little unsettling, highlighting the threats of job automation in the age of AI.
Experts have long warned that the tech could soon start replacing programmers and software engineers in their entirety — but how real this threat is or when we will really start feeling the effects remains uncertain.
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Though he doesn't seem to have explicitly named the algorithmic elephant in the room, it's pretty clear from the tenor of the conversation — and the context surrounding everything related to job security in the tech world right now — that Garman was talking about AI taking over the work of coding.
"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," Garman said, "because that's going to be more and more of what the work is as opposed to sitting down and actually writing code."
In a statement to BI, an AWS spokesperson insisted Garman wasn't issuing a warning but was instead speaking on developers' opportunities to "accomplish more than they do today."
"Matt articulated a vision for how AWS will continue to remove undifferentiated heavy lifting from the developer experience," the spox said, "so that builders can focus more of their skill and energy on the most innovative work."
What that "innovative work" entails, however, remains to be seen.
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