AI could make code obsolete in two years, AWS chief predicts

Developers, the days of typing lines of code may be numbered. At least that's what Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman thinks. In a leaked recording of an internal fireside chat, Garman dropped the bombshell: In 24 months, most developers will no longer be coding.

“24 months from now or some time from now — I can't predict exactly where it will be — probably most developers won't be coding,” Garman said, Business Insider reports.

And Garman is not the only one who believes that this is the future that humanity is building. Navia CEO Jensen Huang said that AI “makes everyone a programmer” without having to know a single thing about coding, while Microsoft's Satya Nadella predicted that AI would create a billion new developers using the same premise.

And just last year, the former CEO of Stability AI, Emad Mostak, predicted that “there will be no programmers in five years.” By removing the need for an internet connection, Google launched the Pixel Gemini Mini locally, and the vision of iPhones being able to run open-source LLMs and even image generators has become a reality in smartphones. Models through applications such as Draw Objects.

But not everyone buys into this AI utopia — or dystopia, depending on your job. Garmin's former chief executive, Adam Selipski, has called some AI companies “massively overrated,” drawing parallels to the dot-com bubble, and warned that while AI itself may change, the impact could be underestimated by Wall Street.

The way AWS Garman sees it, it's not about getting rid of developers entirely, but redefining their role. “Coding is like a language we talk to a computer,” he explained. “It's not just a skill in itself. The skill in itself is how can I innovate? How can I build something that's fun for my end users to use?”

In other words, OpenAI founder Andrei Carpati's prediction that English will be the hottest programming language in the tech space may be true—though it's questionable given how good LMMs are at translating text.

According to Business Insider, the AWS chief introduced developers to the “unique heavy lifting” of working on all aspects of software development. Coders can offload the noise work to AI, Garman said, as they focus their own minds on specific problems.

But what about the economic impact of a society where machines take over the role of humans?

Some fear that hundreds of millions of jobs across the spectrum of the workforce will be lost to AI in the near future, while others see significant growth. AI is predicted to add trillions of dollars to the global economy, and society as a whole will need to adapt. And this comes at a cost: a recent IBM report predicted that at least 40% of the global workforce will need reskilling in the next three years due to the adoption of AI technologies.

The question, of course, is whether AI, as it becomes increasingly intelligent, can do highly creative work as well as mundane things. Considering that nearly 70% of business owners prefer to let robots perform decision-making tasks, we're definitely looking forward to it.