AI has reshaped the role of software engineers by automating code. However, some say that the job was never just about writing code. It was about solving problems.
Matt Wood, AWS’s chief AI and technology officer, said that nowadays, the most exceptional engineers are those who fall in love with a problem, rather than a solution.
“You want them to have less love for their specific solution and more love for the specific problem,” Wood told Business Insider. He leads technology in Amazon’s division that provides cloud and AI services to millions of organizations.
The AI and tech chief added that these engineers aren’t just using AI to write code but also to understand a problem more deeply and pursue multiple paths to solve it.
Wood said that developing software used to be more expensive, and it paid for teams to align on building a single solution. Now, AI lets developers go deeper on the problem and explore multiple ways to solve it at the same time.
His comments come amid a greater shift in expectations for software engineers at the tech giant. Last month, Amazon released a memo sharing new guidelines for software engineers, leaning into what it calls the “era of the Renaissance Developer.” The company revised its guidelines for the role to focus more on long-term impact on customers and the business, rather than on maximizing AI usage.
Engineers once spent days waiting for code reviews, manual testing, and design revisions. Now that AI can generate code, humans are freed up to focus on more complex reviews.
Wood said that engineers who can avoid becoming too attached to a single solution are much more responsive and tend to move faster, he said.
“They’re much happier and have a lot more momentum in their career,” Wood said.
As AI changes the work of software engineers, many technical leaders have weighed in on the qualities that define the top developers. Many have said that taste and judgment are the most important traits as engineers shift into managing agents and making more decisions.
AWS principal engineer David Yanacek recently shared another take: The strongest developers are “paranoid and lazy,” he said. That makes them eager to automate repetitive work, but cautious enough to set guardrails so agents can operate safely without constant oversight.
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