Amazon CEO: AI-Assisted Code Transformation Saved Us 4,500 Years of Developer Work

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp shared this anecdote about Amazon's GenAI assistant for software development, Amazon Q:

On Thursday, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy took to Twitter to boast that using Amazon Q to do Java upgrades has already saved Amazon from having to pay for 4,500 developer-years of work. ('Yes, that number is crazy but, real,' writes Jassy). And Jassy says it also provided Amazon with an additional $260M in annualized efficiency gains from enhanced security and reduced infrastructure costs.

'Our developers shipped 79% of the auto-generated code reviews without any additional changes,' Jassy explained. 'This is a great example of how large-scale enterprises can gain significant efficiencies in foundational software hygiene work by leveraging Amazon Q.'

Jassy — who FORTUNE reported had no formal training in computer science — also touted Amazon Q's Java upgrade prowess in his Letter to Shareholders earlier this year, as has Amazon in its recent SEC filings ('today, developers can save months using Q to move from older versions of Java to newer, more secure and capable ones; in the near future, Q will help developers transform their.net code as well').

Earlier this week, Business Insider reported on a leaked recording of a fireside chat in which AWS CEO Matt Garman predicted a paradigm shift in coding as a career in the foreseeable future with the prevalence of AI. According to Garman, '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.'

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