In leaked audio, Amazon Cloud CEO says AI will soon make human programmers a thing of the past

“Programming is like the language we use to communicate with computers. It's not necessarily a skill in itself.”

Fire and Fury

In a leaked fireside chat, Matt Garman, head of Amazon Web Services (AWS), said that human developers will need to learn different skills in just two years to make room for artificial intelligence programmers.

“If you look 24 months into the future or some other period of time – I can't predict exactly when that will be – it's possible that most developers will no longer be programming,” he exclaimed in an audio recording sent to Business Insider.

Just a month after overseeing hundreds of AWS job cuts in April, Garman was promoted to CEO. With that track record of rapid advancement amid layoffs, he seems perfectly equipped to deliver such a motivational speech to his assembled employees.

“Programming is kind of like the language we speak with computers. It's not necessarily a skill in itself,” the CEO said. “The skill in itself is how I innovate. How do I build something that is interesting to my end users?”

“Being a developer in 2025 may be different than being a developer in 2020,” Garman added.

Although AWS insists Garman was not issuing a “warning,” his language is nonetheless somewhat disturbing, highlighting the dangers of job automation in the age of artificial intelligence. Experts have long warned that the technology could soon replace programmers and software developers entirely—but how real that threat is, and when we'll really feel the impact, remains uncertain.

No code

While he doesn't seem to have explicitly named the obvious problem of algorithms, it's pretty clear from the tone of the conversation—and the context of everything currently related to job security in the tech world—that Garman was talking about AI taking over the work of programming.

“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 going to try to build,” Garman said, “because that's going to be more and more of the work, as opposed to sitting down and actually writing code.”

In a statement to BIAn AWS spokesman stressed that Garman did not issue a warning but spoke about the opportunities for developers to “achieve more than they can today.”

“Matt articulated a vision for how AWS will continue to remove undifferentiated heavy lifting from the developer experience,” the spokesperson said, “so developers can focus more of their skills and energy on the most innovative work.”

What this “innovative work” entails, however, remains to be seen.

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