At every company I’ve ever worked for, the bottleneck is not “how fast can we spit out more code?” It’s always: “how fast can the business actually decide what they want and create a good backlog?”
Maybe startup development will significantly accelerate with AI churning out all the boilerplate to get your app started.
But enterprise development, where the app is already there and you’re building new features on top of a labyrinthian foundation, is a different beast. The hard part is sitting through planning meetings or untangling weird system dependencies, not churning out net new code. My two cents anyway.
idopmstuff · 1h ago
As a PM I have never not had a backlog of little stuff we'd love to do but can't justify prioritizing. I've also almost always had developers who want to make improvements to the codebase that don't get prioritized because we need new features.
The upside is that both of these things are the kind of tasks that are probably good to give to AI. I've always got little UI bugs that bother me every time I use our application but don't actually break anything and thus won't impact revenue and never get done.
I had a frontend engineer, who, when I could just find a way to give him time to do whatever he wanted, would just constantly make little improvements that would incrementally speed up pageload.
Both of those cases feel like places where AI probably gets the job done.
eitally · 1h ago
That sounds good, but if you have a PMO and an enterprise Change Control Board that controls your not-quite-CI/CD deployments, you may find yourself hamstrung. I've been in that position before, where there was simultaneously a bottleneck of clear requirements and also a bunch of stuff (tech debt, small features, bug fixes, UI tweaks) sitting and waiting on a branch ready to deploy when downtime was finally approved. Or, situations where enterprise policy requires human SQA signoff on everything going to prod. There are lots of places you can create inefficiencies in the system and lack of approved requirements is just one.
wrl · 1h ago
> developers who want to make improvements to the codebase that don't get prioritized
So, to clarify – developers want to make improvements to the codebase, and you want to give that work to AI? Have you never been in the shoes of making an improvement or a suggestion for a project that you want to work on, seeing it given to somebody else, and then being assigned just more slog that you don't want to do?
I mean, I'm no PM, but that certainly seems like a way to kill team morale, if nothing else.
> I had a frontend engineer, who, when I could just find a way to give him time to do whatever he wanted, would just constantly make little improvements that would incrementally speed up pageload.
Blows my mind to think that those are the things you want to give to AI. I'd quit.
servercobra · 1h ago
There are tons of small improvements I want to make to our codebase that would be great but take effort. Refactors are a great example. We hand those to Devin (or Cursor background agents, etc), review, and we're all happier for it. Our PM uses it fix those little UI annoyances all the time like "update the text on this button". It's been wonderful.
herval · 2h ago
I never worked at a place where not having a backlog was an issue. Quite the opposite in fact - there’s always infinite backlogs of stuff. Every single time I’ve seen organizations being slow to decide anything, it was due to the human tendency to stretch their tasks to occupy as much time as possible. Planning meetings are “the work” for a legion of people (even though they also know they’re mostly pointless). Untangling dependencies is harder when it involves approvals of other humans (particularly fun as multiple people are “the tech lead”, are all objectively wrong but unable to see how they’re simply getting in the way).
I don’t think LLMs are particularly smart, or capable of, or will definitely replace humans at anything, or if they’ll lead to better work. But I can already tell that their inherent lack of an ego DO accelerate things at enterprises, for the simple reason that the self-imposed roadblocks above stop happening
salt-thrower · 1h ago
At my current workplace, we do have a roadmap for the business, but the actual backlog of tickets to implement work is all waiting on other siloed teams to make decisions that we are downstream of. This ranges from our infrastructure model to simple things like “which CSS components are we allowed to use.”
We are also explicitly NOT allowed to make any code changes that aren’t part of a story that our product owner has approved and prioritized.
The result is that we scrape together some stories to work on every sprint, but if we finish it early, we quickly run into red tape and circular conversations with other “decision makers” who need to tell us what we’re allowed to do before we actually do anything.
It’s fairly maddening. The whole org is hamstrung by a few workaholic individuals who control decision making for several teams and are chronically unavailable as a result.
I’ve seen this sort of thing happen at other big enterprises too but my current situation is perhaps an extreme example of dysfunction. Point being, when an org gets tangled up like this, LLMs aren’t gonna save it :)
herval · 32m ago
The moment those people start being removed, and the little work they do automated, it’ll have a dramatic downstream effect.
I’ve already witnessed a certain big tech that started to move much faster by removing TPMs & EMs across the board, even without LLMs to “replace” them. With LLMs, you need even fewer layers. Then eventually fewer middle-of-business decision makers. In your example, it’s entirely possible that the function of making those components could be entirely subsumed by a single AI bot. That’s starting to happen a lot in the devops space already.
All that said, I doubt your business would benefit from moving faster anyway - most businesses don’t actually need to move faster. I highly recommend the “Bullshit Jobs” book, on this matter. Businesses will just need fewer and fewer people
Aeolun · 1h ago
All of those things will be easier with fewer people involved though?
DoesntMatter22 · 2h ago
Yup I agree. The fundamental limiter is humans deciding. But it will trivial to clone apps where things were already decided.
Though AI will probably just proactively add features and open PRs and people can choose
ethbr1 · 2h ago
There was a submission a few months ago that boiled down to 'AI will force us to reevaluate our human in the loop decision points.'
Which I expect will be the gist of management consulting reports for the next decade.
If human decision-makers become the bottleneck... eventually that will be reengineered.
I'm fascinated to imagine what change control will need to look like in a majority-AI scenario. Expect there will be a lot more focus on TDD.
kaonwarb · 2h ago
I see several folks commenting on this from the perspective of software engineering. Keep in mind that those are a small minority of Amazon's enormous workforce: an estimate a few years back [0] was 3.5%.
[0] https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/amazon
jonny_eh · 2h ago
This is Hacker News sir
exabrial · 2h ago
No it wont lol. It'll just make:
1. The existing codebase worse
2. The existing employees work more
3. The salaries stay flat
AndrewKemendo · 2h ago
You’re making the assumption that these are relevant to the overall goal of Amazon
I’d argue that 1 is irrelevant provided the system continued to extract profit at the same or greater margin
Amazon lives and dies by not caring about #2 so that’s constant
#3 is desirable from Jassy and the boards perspective
Seems like exactly what I’d expect from Amazon
herval · 2h ago
Given the business is still growing, even if that’s all they achieve, it’s already a massive win, no?
msgodel · 2h ago
It's not like Amazon has been optimizing for high quality engineers to begin with.
dymk · 1h ago
I’m of the radical opinion that engineers at Amazon are pretty good, but they’re in a pressure cooker that incentivizes bad work. At minimum, it rarely gives space for people to excel.
pryelluw · 3h ago
“Jassy wrote that employees should learn how to use AI tools and experiment and figure out “how to get more done with scrappier teams.”
Isn’t this their general approach since forever?
happytoexplain · 3h ago
Note that "scrappier" here doesn't just mean fewer staff, but also less experienced and lower-paid staff.
nitwit005 · 2h ago
That's something odd with the recent AI hype. Companies that were already using AI, are making statements like this.
Somehow they want to act like they are making a shift, rather than say they were ahead of the trend.
chneu · 2h ago
That's what businesses do. They want to lower payroll, always, and will use every new innovation to do it.
The wording changes, the intention doesn't.
If they could pay you nothing they would.
nitwit005 · 1h ago
This doesn't appear to relate to what I said.
goatlover · 2h ago
Sounds like a flaw in the dominant economic model.
ethbr1 · 2h ago
I mean, labor is a significant component of prices for goods.
But I expect the increasing income stratification of the 10s+ is a harbinger that we're running out of high-paying jobs for the number of people who are qualified for them.
And the window is closing for countries to agree to something like a structural tax on AI with benefits going to society to address the ills.
Absent that: further stratification, more employee-less businesses, and not a great future
dale_huevo · 3h ago
Next they'll take away the door desks.
827a · 2h ago
I find it extremely strange that a company leader though it would be ok to just say "our financial situation is in a place where we cannot adequately staff our teams". The market clearly thought it was strange as well, given their stock performance today.
Really bad look and poor leadership from Jassy. There's a good way to frame adoption of AI, but this is not it.
usefulcat · 1h ago
> The market clearly thought it was strange as well, given their stock performance today.
For 6/17, the S&P 500 was down 0.84%, QQQ (Nasdaq stocks) was down 0.98% and AMZN was down 0.59%.
AMZN slightly outperformed the market today.
droopyEyelids · 2h ago
Small and scrappy teams work when the team has less than 8 hours of corporate busywork to do a day (Jira, compliance training, triaging 10k alerts from the new scanning software, etc)
theslurmmustflo · 3h ago
How many h1bs will they ask for during that time?
sterlind · 2h ago
we really need immigration reform. companies prefer H1B workers because they can treat them like indentured servants: they're bound to the company that sponsored their visa, and have only 60 days to find a new job if fired or they'll be deported. companies can also reset the green card process in retaliation if they do leave.
I'm radically pro-immigrant. I want the smartest people from around the world to come work here. I want to unshackle them from their corporate sponsors. the current system is unfair to immigrants (who are bound like serfs to their workplace) and to citizens (who lose jobs because corporations prefer serfs.)
rurp · 2h ago
I'm really surprised there isn't more pushback to the program since it has aspects that piss off post political sides. Maybe it's just too wonky for mainstream political coverage. A system of indentured servants really is the best description, the potential for abuse is both obvious and widespread. For the other side of course they can jobs from Americans in many cases. Big tech companies love hiring people they can abuse, especially if they can also pay them less than local hires.
DragonStrength · 2h ago
My entire old team at Amazon has been reduced from 8 people of which 5 were citizens (and one got his green card while I was there) to 2 immigrants who arrived right before the pandemic both from different at-war countries. I only know this because after the last round of layoffs one of them reached out to me asking if I could get him out of that hell. Seems pretty straightforward what has happened here.
amazingamazing · 2h ago
Don’t b racist
ofjcihen · 1h ago
TIL immigrant is a race
amazingamazing · 1h ago
When 75%+ of them are non white, yup. Changed to xenophobic tho to help you
ofjcihen · 1h ago
I don’t think all immigrants are H1B holders, are they?
amazingamazing · 1h ago
Are h1bs immigrants?
ofjcihen · 42m ago
Sure, but that’s not what being xenophobic means.
Do you think that maybe it’s possible the OP has a problem with the program and that crying racism whenever someone brings it up might actually be hurting your argument?
umbra07 · 1h ago
Is this satire?
altairprime · 2h ago
Replacing the topic word “says” with “hopes” is a more precise statement about the mindset driving the creative theft behind AI; only the hope of deprecating all skilled workers in America with one technological advancement, without loss of gross revenue, could justify as severe a gamble as corporations are taking on it.
loosetypes · 2h ago
He also released an internal memo on atoz today with a grammatical mistake in the first sentence.
tqi · 2h ago
As long as managers want to be senior managers, senior managers want to be directors, and directors want to be vice presidents, this will not happen
SimianSci · 2h ago
At this point im convinced that these sorts of headlines are being intentionally put out there as a form of marketing via fear.
What better way to convince people to learn/use your AI offerings than to have those people think their livelihoods are in danger because of them.
AI has provided alot of unique value, but despite the countless headlines stoking fear of mass job loss, there still remains little substance to these claims of being able to automate anything but the most meanial of jobs.
Until we can directly point the finger to AI as the cause of job loss numbers rising, and not other unrelated economic factors, this all just smells of fear mongering with a profit incentive.
SlowTao · 2h ago
Yep, "out tech is so amazing it will take jobs! Please invest now!"
1970-01-01 · 1h ago
So what happens during an S3 outage? Who gets blamed when things are offline and the AI isn't sure what to do? Even better, what happens when the AI running on the same region that is down?
mym1990 · 1h ago
Surely Amazon would implement redundancy where an AI from a different region to the one that is down would take over. Not sure I follow why "blaming" someone is necessary to move forward with recovering from a failure. In most workplaces, the post mortem is around figuring out what the issue was and remediating it/making sure it doesn't occur in the future, not pointing fingers.
ldjkfkdsjnv · 1h ago
theyve been automating S3 operations for 15 years. the critical AWS services are extremely mature, people have no clue
tartoran · 2h ago
And shrink the product as well even though they will try to look like it's growing. AI will not only eat into the workforce but the profits these companies are making.
podgietaru · 2h ago
I don’t doubt that Amazon will do this. Not because of the efficacy of the tools, but because of the direction Amazon has been going in for years.
But, you know, company that has invested billions in AI selling the idea that AI will be replacing labour is not surprising.
ldjkfkdsjnv · 1h ago
Inside view:
Amazon has a document writing culture, all of those documents will be written by AI. People have built careers on writing documents. Same with operations, its all about audit logs. Internally, there are MCPs that have already automated TPMs/PMs/Oncall/maintenance coding. Some orgs in AWS are 90% foreign, there is fear about losing visa status and going back, the automation is just beginning. Sonnet 4 felt like the first time MCPs could actually be used to automate work.
A region expansion scoping project in AWS that required detailed design and inspection of tens of code bases was done in a day, it would usually require two or three weeks of design work.
The automation is real, and the higher are ups are directly monitoring token usage in their org, and pushing senior engineers to increase Q/token usage metrics among low level engineers. Most orgs have a no backfill policy for engineers leaving, they are supplimenting staffing needs with indian contractors, the expectation being that fewer engineers will be needed in a years time.
user4673568345 · 2h ago
The ole ai perpetual labor machine is a big fat lie
smrtinsert · 2h ago
If that's all he sees, it's a hilariously myopic take on the impact of AI.
AI is for coding velocity like electricity is for better room lighting.
We haven't seen the nature of work after AI yet, we're still in a nascent phase. Consider every single white collar role, process, worfklow in your organization up for extreme disruption during this transition period, and it will take at least a decade to even begin to sort out.
poslathian · 55m ago
I like this metaphor about electric lighting. However, having lived in two ~1850 houses, they sure look and function a lot like they did before electricity, despite nearly every element having been “disrupted” by electricity and all the rest.
Maybe startup development will significantly accelerate with AI churning out all the boilerplate to get your app started.
But enterprise development, where the app is already there and you’re building new features on top of a labyrinthian foundation, is a different beast. The hard part is sitting through planning meetings or untangling weird system dependencies, not churning out net new code. My two cents anyway.
The upside is that both of these things are the kind of tasks that are probably good to give to AI. I've always got little UI bugs that bother me every time I use our application but don't actually break anything and thus won't impact revenue and never get done.
I had a frontend engineer, who, when I could just find a way to give him time to do whatever he wanted, would just constantly make little improvements that would incrementally speed up pageload.
Both of those cases feel like places where AI probably gets the job done.
So, to clarify – developers want to make improvements to the codebase, and you want to give that work to AI? Have you never been in the shoes of making an improvement or a suggestion for a project that you want to work on, seeing it given to somebody else, and then being assigned just more slog that you don't want to do?
I mean, I'm no PM, but that certainly seems like a way to kill team morale, if nothing else.
> I had a frontend engineer, who, when I could just find a way to give him time to do whatever he wanted, would just constantly make little improvements that would incrementally speed up pageload.
Blows my mind to think that those are the things you want to give to AI. I'd quit.
I don’t think LLMs are particularly smart, or capable of, or will definitely replace humans at anything, or if they’ll lead to better work. But I can already tell that their inherent lack of an ego DO accelerate things at enterprises, for the simple reason that the self-imposed roadblocks above stop happening
We are also explicitly NOT allowed to make any code changes that aren’t part of a story that our product owner has approved and prioritized.
The result is that we scrape together some stories to work on every sprint, but if we finish it early, we quickly run into red tape and circular conversations with other “decision makers” who need to tell us what we’re allowed to do before we actually do anything.
It’s fairly maddening. The whole org is hamstrung by a few workaholic individuals who control decision making for several teams and are chronically unavailable as a result.
I’ve seen this sort of thing happen at other big enterprises too but my current situation is perhaps an extreme example of dysfunction. Point being, when an org gets tangled up like this, LLMs aren’t gonna save it :)
I’ve already witnessed a certain big tech that started to move much faster by removing TPMs & EMs across the board, even without LLMs to “replace” them. With LLMs, you need even fewer layers. Then eventually fewer middle-of-business decision makers. In your example, it’s entirely possible that the function of making those components could be entirely subsumed by a single AI bot. That’s starting to happen a lot in the devops space already.
All that said, I doubt your business would benefit from moving faster anyway - most businesses don’t actually need to move faster. I highly recommend the “Bullshit Jobs” book, on this matter. Businesses will just need fewer and fewer people
Though AI will probably just proactively add features and open PRs and people can choose
Which I expect will be the gist of management consulting reports for the next decade.
If human decision-makers become the bottleneck... eventually that will be reengineered.
I'm fascinated to imagine what change control will need to look like in a majority-AI scenario. Expect there will be a lot more focus on TDD.
1. The existing codebase worse
2. The existing employees work more
3. The salaries stay flat
I’d argue that 1 is irrelevant provided the system continued to extract profit at the same or greater margin
Amazon lives and dies by not caring about #2 so that’s constant
#3 is desirable from Jassy and the boards perspective
Seems like exactly what I’d expect from Amazon
Isn’t this their general approach since forever?
Somehow they want to act like they are making a shift, rather than say they were ahead of the trend.
The wording changes, the intention doesn't.
If they could pay you nothing they would.
But I expect the increasing income stratification of the 10s+ is a harbinger that we're running out of high-paying jobs for the number of people who are qualified for them.
And the window is closing for countries to agree to something like a structural tax on AI with benefits going to society to address the ills.
Absent that: further stratification, more employee-less businesses, and not a great future
Really bad look and poor leadership from Jassy. There's a good way to frame adoption of AI, but this is not it.
For 6/17, the S&P 500 was down 0.84%, QQQ (Nasdaq stocks) was down 0.98% and AMZN was down 0.59%.
AMZN slightly outperformed the market today.
I'm radically pro-immigrant. I want the smartest people from around the world to come work here. I want to unshackle them from their corporate sponsors. the current system is unfair to immigrants (who are bound like serfs to their workplace) and to citizens (who lose jobs because corporations prefer serfs.)
Do you think that maybe it’s possible the OP has a problem with the program and that crying racism whenever someone brings it up might actually be hurting your argument?
AI has provided alot of unique value, but despite the countless headlines stoking fear of mass job loss, there still remains little substance to these claims of being able to automate anything but the most meanial of jobs. Until we can directly point the finger to AI as the cause of job loss numbers rising, and not other unrelated economic factors, this all just smells of fear mongering with a profit incentive.
But, you know, company that has invested billions in AI selling the idea that AI will be replacing labour is not surprising.
Amazon has a document writing culture, all of those documents will be written by AI. People have built careers on writing documents. Same with operations, its all about audit logs. Internally, there are MCPs that have already automated TPMs/PMs/Oncall/maintenance coding. Some orgs in AWS are 90% foreign, there is fear about losing visa status and going back, the automation is just beginning. Sonnet 4 felt like the first time MCPs could actually be used to automate work.
A region expansion scoping project in AWS that required detailed design and inspection of tens of code bases was done in a day, it would usually require two or three weeks of design work.
The automation is real, and the higher are ups are directly monitoring token usage in their org, and pushing senior engineers to increase Q/token usage metrics among low level engineers. Most orgs have a no backfill policy for engineers leaving, they are supplimenting staffing needs with indian contractors, the expectation being that fewer engineers will be needed in a years time.
AI is for coding velocity like electricity is for better room lighting.
We haven't seen the nature of work after AI yet, we're still in a nascent phase. Consider every single white collar role, process, worfklow in your organization up for extreme disruption during this transition period, and it will take at least a decade to even begin to sort out.