At Amazon, Some Coders Say Their Jobs Have Begun to Resemble Warehouse Work
127 comments
·May 25, 2025timkam
Is it really that LLM-based tools make developers so much more productive or rather that organizations have found out they can do with less -- and less privileged -- developers? What I don't really see, especially not big tech-internally, are stories of teams that have become amazingly more productive. For now it feels we get some minor productivity improvements that probably do not off-set the invest and are barely enough to keep the narrative alive.
locococo
A lot of it is perception. Writing software was long considered somewhat difficult and that it required smart people to do so. AI changes this perception and coding starts to be perceived as a low level task that anyone can do easily with augmentation from AI tools. I certainly agree that writing software is turning more into a factory job and is less intellectually rewarding now.
cmiles74
When I started working in the field (1996), I was told that I would receive detailed specs from an analyst that I would then "translate" into code. At that time this idea was already out of fashion, things worked this way for the core business team (COBOL on the AS/400) but in my group (internal tools, Delphi mostly) I would get only the most vague requirements.
Eventually everyone was expected to understand a good deal of the code they were working on. The analyst and the coder became the same person.
I'm deeply skeptical that the kind of people that enjoy software development are the same kind of people that enjoy steering and proofing LLM generated code. Unlike the analyst and the coder, this strike me as a very different skill set.
codr7
And less skilled.
I totally get that AI can be a huge boost for shitty code monkeys.
Pet_Ant
I see it more as replacing shitty code monkeys because it leaves the hard parts behind.
add-sub-mul-div
For this narrative to make sense you would have to believe that Amazon management cares more about short-term profit than the long-term quality of their work.
timkam
The narrative reflects a broader cultural shift, from "we are all in this together" (pandemic) to "our organizations are bloated and people don't work hard enough" (already pre-LLM hype post-pandemic). The observation that less-skilled people can, with the help of LLMs, take the work of traditionally more-skilled people fits this narrative. In the end, it is about demoting some types of knowledge workers from the skilled class to the working class. Apparently, important people believe that this is a long-term sustainable narrative.
closewith
The skilled class is the working class and always has been. The delusion that software developers were ever outside the working class because they were paid well is just that - an arrogant delusion.
neom
Why are you using the word "demoting"?
locococo
Management has different layers with different goals. A middle manager and a director certainly care a lot about accomplishing short term goals and are ok with tech debt to meet the goals.
layer8
So it does make sense?
usrnm
I said it before and I'll say it again: it's high time we got the taste of our own medicine. Getting people out of jobs has been the main selling point of our industry since its first days, this is what we've collectively been doing for decades. Do I want my job to be automated right in front of my eyes? Not really. Do I see some poetic justice in the whole thing? Absolutely.
A1kmm
Software development is the most automated career in the history of all time.
Assemblers, Linkers, Compilers, Copying, Macros, Makefiles, Code gen, Templates, CI & CD, Editors, Auto-complete, IDEs are all terms that describe types of automation in software development.
LLM-generated code is another form of automation, but it certainly isn't the first. Right now most of the problems are when it is inappropriately used. The same applies to other forms of automation too - but LLMs are really hyped up right now. Probably it will go through the normal hype cycle where there'll be a crash, and then a plateau where LLMs are used to drive productivity but expectations of their capability are more aligned to reality.
lloeki
In french the two fields that are Computer Science and Information Technology are under the same moniker: "informatique", a portmanteau of information and automatic.
The whole field is about automating yourself out of a job, and it's right in the name.
bgwalter
Contraction of "information" and "electronics" according to this site:
https://grodiko.fr/informatique?lang=en
German site claims that "Informatik", which is practically the same, is a contraction of "Information" and "Mathematik":
https://www.pctipp.ch/praxis/gewusst/kam-begriff-informatik-...
jampekka
Gloating about hardships was and is a great way to ensure things will get worse for workers as efficiency and automation increases.
Another option would be to join forces to collectively demand more equitable distribution of the fruits of technological development. Sadly it doesn't seem to be very popular.
wkat4242
> Sadly it doesn't seem to be very popular
Strange enough the people that have the most to gain from keeping things the same, are really successful at convincing the masses who have the most to benefit from change in this regard to vote against it.
https://pjhollis123.medium.com/careful-mate-that-foreigner-w...
amanaplanacanal
Certainly back when I worked in IT, the people I worked with were mostly very much anti-union. I didn't hear much anti immigrant talk back then but I've been retired for a while.
happytoexplain
Savoring suffering is uniquely hideous, and one of the grand hallmarks of almost every facet of the decline of the US. It's a clear, bright sign of the death of one's humanity, and the foundation of all evil.
Is that dramatic? No.
More specifically: Things can be inevitable and also horrible. It is not some kind of cognitive dissonance to care about people losing their livelihoods and also agree that it had to happen. We can structure society to help people, but instead we hate the imaginary stereotypes we've generalized every conceivable grouping of real people into, politics being the most obvious example, but we do it with everything, as you have.
The electrician doesn't "deserve" punishment for "advocating" away the jobs replaced by electricity. The engineer doesn't "deserve" punishment for "advocating" away the jobs replaced by engineering. A person isn't an asshole who deserves his family to suffer because he committed his life to learning to write application servers, or whatever.
closewith
If in the process of automating away people's livelihoods, you do not simultaneously advocate for the destruction of the capitalist system that ties the well-being of people and their families intrinsically to those jobs, then you do in fact deserve what's coming to you. History shows that retribution against class traitors is not limited to financial hardship, either.
smokel
I have been in this industry for some time, and over the years I have only seen more people being glued to electronic devices, not less.
It might have been a selling point, but the status quo is that we are inventing new jobs faster than phasing out old ones. The new jobs aren't necessarily more enjoyable, though, and there are no more smoking breaks.
aatd86
not necessarily. the economies of scale might be increasing as dev productivity increases. the goal of many businesses being to do more with less.
neom
The goal of all American business is exactly the same: maximize the return of profits to the shareholders at large. It is in fact, the law. Do more with less is a natural consequence of this.
layer8
The problem I see is less that of losing jobs, but the fact that the jobs get less enjoyable, less deep work, more mindlessness and less reflection, and possibly also the quality of the produced software decreasing.
Modern AI encroaches upon what software engineers consider to be interesting work, and also adds more of what they find less enjoyable — using natural language instead of formal language (aka code) for detailed specification — which creates a conflict that didn’t previously exist in software technology.
SpaceNoodled
LLMs can't do creative or unique work. They're really only useful for boilerplate, which is the tedious part.
casenmgreen
I may be wrong, but I think every job creates wealth overall (or it would not exist), and that software engineering has been making some jobs more efficient and others not necessary, and then the wealth which formerly had to be employed where those jobs were inefficient, or had to exist at all, is then employed elsewhere.
If you are the person who lost their job, you get all the downside.
Overall, over the whole of the economy, the entire population, and a reasonable period of time, this increasing efficiency is a core driver of the annual overall increase in wealth we know as economic growth.
When an economy is growing, there is in general demand for workers, and so pay and conditions are encouraged; when an economy is shrinking, there is less demand than supply, and pay and conditions are discouraged.
closewith
> Overall, over the whole of the economy, the entire population, and a reasonable period of time, this increasing efficiency is a core driver of the annual overall increase in wealth we know as economic growth.
This is only true while wealth inequality is decreasing, which it is not.
devnullbrain
The person the headline refers to is a webdev. What job is that getting rid of?
closewith
Literally hundreds of millions of customer facing roles globally. This question is so ridiculous that it might be trolling? Or are you so young that you don't remember the world pre-web?
sokoloff
Web dev doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
Web dev for e-commmerce displaced brick and mortar retail. Web dev for streaming displaced video rentals and audio sales.
devnullbrain
Web devs are a tiny proportion of the employees needed for e-commerce.
garretraziel
Cashiers, some officials, a lot of the “personal contact with a customer” gets transferred to web. I am not complaining, just answering the question.
devnullbrain
Same goes for a truck driver, road builder, railway worker, etc.
FWIW, I spent many years as a cashier. It's not something I find inherently more valuable to the world. If we could trust people not to steal, we wouldn't need them.
null
wkat4242
Hmm on the other hand, there isn't much resistance against genAI in software development (unlike other creative industries) because ours is founded in collaboration and continuing others' work. It's where open source came from, and the use of libraries. Using stackoverflow was never frowned on. AI is just the same but more efficient. Nobody invents the wheel from scratch.
It will change the job yes but it also can mean the job can go in new directions because we can do more with less.
bgwalter
There isn't much open resistance because most of open source developers are bought and paid for. So they continue the path of destruction in the hopes that they will not be obsolete.
This is naive of course. Once you have identified yourself as corporate servants (like for example the CPython developers) the companies will disrespect you and fire you when convenient (as has happened at Google and Microsoft).
wkat4242
These things are waves. First they will fire a bunch of people, but no company can grow through constant downsizing. Then they'll start to imagine to do new things they can do with the new skills and invest in that.
It will cause a displacement of job types for sure. But I think it means change more than decline. When industrialisation happened, lots of factory workers were afraid of their jobs and also lost them. But these days nobody even wants to do a menial factory job, slaving away on the production line for minimum wage. In fact most people have a far better life now than the masses did before industrialisation. We also had the computer automation that made entire classes of jobs obsolete. Yet it's almost impossible to find skilled workers in Holland now.
And companies need customers with purchasing power. They can't replace everyone with AI because there will be nobody left with money to sell things to. In the end there will be another balance. The interim time, that's the difficult part. Though it is temporary, it can really hurt specific people.
But I don't see AI as a downward spiral that will never recover. In the end it will enable us to look more towards the future (and I am by no means an "AI bro", I think current capabilities of AI have been ridicuously overhyped)
I think we need to redraw society too to compensate. Things like universal basic income, better welfare etc. Here in Europe we already have that but under the neoliberal regimes of the last 20 years (and the fallout from the American banking crisis), things have been austerised too much.
In America this won't happen as it seems to go only the other way (very hardline capitalism, with a fundamentalist almost taliban-like religious streak) but well, it's what they voted for.
jt2190
This is interesting:
> “It’s more fun to write code than to read code,” said Simon Willison, an A.I. fan who is a longtime programmer and blogger, channeling the objections of other programmers. “If you’re told you have to do a code review, it’s never a fun part of the job. When you’re working with these tools, it’s most of the job.”
> This shift from writing to reading code can make engineers feel as if they are bystanders in their own jobs. The Amazon engineers said that managers have encouraged them to use A.I. to help write one-page memos proposing a solution to a software problem and that the artificial intelligence can now generate a rough draft from scattered thoughts.
> They also use A.I. to test the software features they build, a tedious job that nonetheless has forced them to think deeply about their coding.
timr
I was just thinking about this the other day (after spending an extended session talking to an LLM about bugs in its code), and I realized that when I was just starting out, I enjoyed writing code, but now the fun part is actually fixing bugs.
Maybe I'm weird, but chasing down bugs is like solving a puzzle. Writing green-field code is maybe a little bit enjoyable, but especially in areas I know well, it's mostly boring now. I'd rather do just about anything than write another iteration of a web form or connect some javascript widget to some other javascript widget in the framework flavor of the week. To some extent, then, working with LLMs has restored some of the fun of coding because it takes care of the tedious part, and I get to solve the interesting problems.
danielbln
I'm with you. I love solving puzzles to make something go. In the past that involved writing code, but it's not the code writing that I love, it's the problem solving and building. And I get plenty of that now, in a post-LLM world.
seanmcdirmid
Bugs are awesome. I picked my current job at Google because it involved lots of bug fixing and crash investigation.
ape4
Fixing bugs in my own code is fine. In other's code its less fun.
notyourwork
That’s the wrong mentality. You and your team own all the code. A bugs peer is your bug too.
Wowfunhappy
Why?
pbw
Companies will always try to capture the productivity gains from a new tool or technique, and then quickly establish it as the new standard for everyone. This is frustrating and feels Sisyphean: it seems like you simply cannot get ahead.
The game is to learn new tools quickly and learn to use them better than most of your peers, then stay quietly a bit ahead. But know you have to keep doing this forever. Or to work for yourself or in an environment where you get the gains, not the employer. But "work for yourself" probably means direct competition with others who are just as expert as you with AI, so that's no panacea.
jampekka
Another game is to distribute the gains from increased productivity more equally. E.g. in Europe as late as early 2000s working hours were reduced in response to technological development. But since then the response even from workers seems to be to demand increasingly shittier bullshit jobs to keep people busy.
almostgotcaught
Bro lol. You were this close - you're channeling Marx (literally saying the same stuff he was) and instead of coming to the obvious conclusion (unions) you're like nah I'm just gonna alienate myself further. It's just amazing how thoroughly people have been brainwashed. I'm 100% sure nothing will ever improve.
vjvjvjvjghv
With all the changes coming up, I am happy that I am retiring soon. Since I started in the 90s, SW dev has become more and more tightly controlled and feels more like an assembly line. When I started, you could work for weeks and months without much interruption. You had plenty of time for experimentation and creativity. Now everything is ticked based and you constantly have to report status and justify what you are doing. I am sure there will always be devs who are doing interesting work but I feel these opportunities will be less and less.
In a way it's only fair. Automation has made a lot of jobs obsolete or miserable. Software devs are a big contributor to automation so we shouldn't be surprised that we are finally managing to automate our own jobs away,
julkali
I think there is a fundamental misconception of the benefit / performance-improvement of LLM-aided programming:
Without sacrificing code quality, it only makes coding more productive _if you already know_ what you're doing.
This means that while it has a big potential for experienced programmers (making them push out more good code), you cannot replace them by an army of code monkeys with LLMs and expect good software.
neom
I keep reading this but I feel it really ignores gaussian, where are your lines? What is good enough for what where? What is the base level of already know? I'm churning out a web app for fun right now with a couple of second year comp sci students from Sri Lanka + LLMs, they charge me around $1000 a month and my friend who is a SRE at appl looks at the code every week, said it's quality, modern and scalable. I do think they're a bit slow, but I'm not looking for fast.
baxtr
>This shift from writing to reading code can make engineers feel as if they are bystanders in their own jobs. The Amazon engineers said that managers have encouraged them to use A.I. to help write one-page memos proposing a solution to a software problem and that the artificial intelligence can now generate a rough draft from scattered thoughts.
This feels like we are forcing people who rather look at code to start talking in plain language, which not every dev likes or is proficient in.
Devs won’t be replaced by AI. Devs will be replaced by people that can (and want to) speak to LLMs.
ManBeardPc
I feel my job in the future will be more secure than ever. Tons and tons of AI generated garbage code (trained on more and more existing garbage code) that the „developer“ will at a certain point no longer be able to maintain or fix. Not even speaking about trusting the output. Feels similar to all the outsourced development to cheap suppliers that inevitably collapse or create horrible maintenance overhead.
nlitened
Do you feel you would be able to “maintain and fix” LLM-generated 100-megabyte source code blobs? And if you could, do you think it would be a job you’d want to do?
ManBeardPc
No, writing a replacement. Either part by part or a whole new software system.
WD-42
Secure, sure. But this sounds like a crappy job.
telesilla
Will AI also start developing creative tools such as new VST plugins or photoshop filters? What about low-level low-latency tools needed for some industries or for aerospace. I guess at some point we won't need so many humans to run our Kubernetes clusters or maintain our WordPress sites but won't there always be something to do that pushes the boundaries of human needs and desires that can't be done by AI?
neom
From the business side of the house, I only ever look at it as what can do the right job for the right money to very quickly deliver continuous value to customers. In an employee base: Experience around is always good for growing and improving my people, but it isn't necessarily tied directly to the work to be done. The shift I feel is happening is how I place the value here. Where I can imagine I would land if I was actively running a startup right now is making sure I have amazing production teams (whatever that looks like, age, location, LLM powered or otherwise) book ended by great people growers as all cogs start to squeak if they're not oiled, and experience is the best lubricant on teams, you need both.
talles
It amazes me how immature our field can be. Anyone that worked for big corporations and in humongous codebases know how 'generating new code' is a small part of the job.
AI blew up and suddenly I'm seeing seasoned people talking about KLOC like in the 90s.
mk89
Yes, because from my observations these are the people who cannot write anymore code today - they really don't understand the newer paradigms or technologies. So Copilot enabled a lot of people to write POCs and ship them to production fast, without thinking too much about edge cases, HA, etc.
And these people have become advocates in their respective companies, so that everyone is actually following inaccurate claims about productivity improvements. These are the same people quoting Google's ceo who say that 30% of newly generated code at Google is written by AI, without possibility to deny or validate it. Just blindly quote a company that has a huge conflict of interests in this field and you'll look smarter than you are.
This is where we're at today. I understand these are great tools, but all I am seeing madness around. And who works with these tools on a daily basis knows it. Knows what it means, how they can be misleading, etc.
But hey, everyone says we must use them ...
SonOfKyuss
Agreed. I spend maybe 20% of my time writing code. The rest is gathering requirements, design, testing, scheduling. Maybe if that 20% now takes half as long, I might have time to actually write some tests and documentation
https://archive.ph/HVZRL