That’s the view of Matt Garman, CEO of Amazon Web Services, who shared his thoughts during an internal fireside chat in June, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by Business Insider.
“If you look 24 months into the future or any period of time – I can’t predict exactly when that will be – it’s possible that most developers will no longer be programming,” said Garman, who became CEO of AWS in June.
“Programming is kind of like the language we speak with computers. It’s not necessarily a skill in itself,” the manager explained. “The skill in itself is how I innovate. How do I build something that is interesting to my end users?”
This means the job of a software developer will change, Garman added.
“It just means that each of us needs to be more attuned to what our customers need and what the actual end product is that we’re trying to build, because that’s always going to be more work as opposed to sitting down and actually writing code,” he said.
No dire warning
Talk that AI will disrupt and even eliminate jobs has grown louder recently as companies lay off employees or stop hiring new ones to put their resources into AI development. New AI tools that automatically generate code can help companies do more with the same number of engineers or fewer of these expensive employees. AWS laid off hundreds of employees earlier this year.
Offering advice, Garman stopped short of warning that developers would die out because of AI. His tone was optimistic, hinting at more creative opportunities for developers. He said AWS is helping its employees “continue to hone their skills and learn new technologies” to increase their productivity using AI.
“Being a developer in 2025 may be different than being a developer in 2020,” Garman added.
No more “undifferentiated hard work”
AWS spokeswoman Aisha Johnson told BI that Garman’s comments highlighted the opportunity for developers to “accomplish more than they can today” with new AI tools. There was no indication that he expected the role of developers to decline, she added.
“Matt articulated a vision for how AWS will continue to remove undifferentiated heavy lifting from the developer experience so developers can focus more of their skills and energy on the most innovative work,” Johnson said in a statement.
“Today everyone is a programmer”
Garman is not the first senior executive to predict such an AI-driven shift in developer jobs.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has said that thanks to new AI coding assistants, “everyone is a programmer today.”
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that easier access to AI technologies will create a billion developers in the future.
Former CEO of Stability AI, Emad Mostaque, even predicted that “in five years there will be no more programmers.”
A new AI workflow
In his talk, Garman urged employees to rethink the way they work and look for new ways to integrate AI into their workflows.
For example, software maker Smartsheet recently embedded AI features from Amazon’s chatbot “Q” into a Slack channel that answers employee questions about internal policies and documentation, he said.
“We often think about the customers, which is great, but I would also encourage everyone internally to think about how to completely change what they do,” Garman said.
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