Software program growth has all the time been in a state of flux, in response to Amazon CTO Werner Vogels. Whether or not it’s new instruments, processes, or programming languages, over time builders have needed to evolve to satisfy altering calls for.
With AI now within the equation and shaking up the business, builders are as soon as once more pressured to adapt to the altering nature of the career.
It’s a subject that Vogels mentioned at size throughout his keynote at AWS re:Invent 2025 in Las Vegas. The ‘Renaissance Developer’, as he described, captures the essence of the present state of affairs within the business.
The Renaissance caused sweeping social, cultural, and financial adjustments throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and within the trendy tech business these identical adjustments are unfolding. Chatting with ITPro at AWS Summit London, Vogels notes the time period highlights that the business’s ongoing transformation represents the “subsequent step within the pure evolution of growth”. Throughout his profession, he’s witnessed sweeping adjustments.
“After I began off programming, I did that in VI or Emacs,” he says. “Then we obtained the primary IDEs. Microsoft had these items the place you may draw packing containers on the display screen and issues like that.
“And now you’ve got Cursor and Kiro and all the opposite instruments, and there would be the subsequent set of instruments after that.”
To be a Renaissance Developer, Vogels explains that devs should have an innate urge to discover new concepts, study new issues, and adapt to the adjustments unfolding round them.
“As a software program developer, you naturally must have a willingness to study, to study new stuff, as a result of there’s all the time one thing new across the nook,” he tells ITPro.
“Whether or not that could be a programming language, whether or not it is an IDE, whether or not it’s a new set of instruments, whether or not it’s a complete set of latest purposes that you simply could not construct earlier than.
“It’s a pure evolution over time, and I believe that is in all probability additionally why software program growth is a kind of areas that’s repeatedly in flux.”
The altering face of software program growth
The inflow of AI instruments in software program growth over the past three years is remodeling the business. Certainly, the know-how is now a mainstay for almost all of builders, with analysis from JetBrains final 12 months exhibiting that 85% use AI every day.
“Vibe coding” has surged in recognition, to the purpose the place it was named the 2025 Phrase of the Yr by Collins Dictionary. With these advances in AI, the prospect of totally automated software program growth has sparked some considerations.
Builders ranging in seniority, from junior to senior ranges, have been bombarded with claims that AI may steal jobs and render them out of date.
What has grow to be clear is that builders might want to adapt to accommodate this inflow of AI instruments. Analysis from Gartner, for instance, instructed that round 80% of devs and engineers might want to upskill or reskill within the coming years to compensate for the adjustments caused by the know-how.
No extra “code monkeys”
Vogels tells ITPro that the standard picture of the developer as a “code monkey” merely producing code will fade as AI turns into more and more frequent in each day processes.
That’s to not say builders received’t be wanted, nonetheless. Different vital duties comparable to high quality assurance will nonetheless require human contact, creativity, and ingenuity. The institutional data that builders have will even grow to be more and more essential with AI within the image, he added.
“With each instrument that we get, we transfer away a bit farther from the code monkey thought, the one which simply varieties issues, to somebody whose uniqueness is a mind, who understands the larger image, who understands how this specific smaller perform wants to suit into the larger gap,” he says.
Vogels provides that one of many key elements of being a Renaissance Developer is that they should be a polymath with a deep understanding of each their craft and their position inside the group they’re part of.
“You might want to perceive the entire image,” he says. “Sure, you will be magic in databases, completely the very best, spectacular developer, however you additionally want to know the context during which this must be used.
“And you could even assist your colleagues, as a result of they could not perceive all the pieces about databases. So collaboration [and] communication, there’s much more emphasis on that than there could have been previously.”
It’s right here that builders are shifting from an operational position to extra of a strategic one, overseeing automated growth processes and protecting issues working easily.
A key instance of this transformation in motion was detailed throughout the AWS Summit keynote. Ryan Cormack, principal engineer at Motorway, famous that AI was serving to growth groups produce code at a much more environment friendly price. Utilizing Kiro, AWS’ coding agent, the corporate is producing over 1,000,000 traces of code each month. However with that comes extra duty for builders, Cormack famous.
Opinions are extra vital than ever to establish and remediate flawed code, which is proving to be a key subject within the age of AI-powered coding. In a 2025 survey from Aikido, 69% of safety leaders, engineers, and builders revealed they’d discovered severe flaws in AI-written code.
Vogels says the Motorway instance is a “prototypical story” of how AI helps each streamline growth whereas including new issues and ranges of complexity.
“Code critiques aren’t going to go away. Although the instrument could have generated the code, we as people nonetheless want to have the ability to take a look at it and truly confirm what has been constructed.”
“Now in that world, we’re getting a lot of new instruments as properly that assist us with that,” he provides. “I’ve seen a number of of our clients taking the output from one LLM and feeding it into one other and saying, is that basically true?”
Supporting the following era
AI’s impression on entry-level roles has been a recurring speaking level over the past 18 months. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei instructed half of entry-level “white collar” roles could possibly be worn out within the subsequent 5 years, for instance. In software program growth, the state of affairs is not any completely different, with considerations rising concerning the inflow of AI instruments decreasing the necessity for junior builders.
As ITPro reported final 12 months, AWS CEO Matt Garman poured chilly water on these claims largely as a result of enterprises require a expertise pipeline that brings by the following era of staff.
The developer expertise pipeline within the UK has proven indicators of stress in recent times, with analysis from Stack Overflow noting that the typical age of devs stands at 39 years outdated. Whereas the agency mentioned this reveals the workforce is “technically mature”, the examine raised considerations about future expertise and long-term worldwide competitiveness.
Increasing on Garman’s feedback, Vogels tells ITPro that he views AI as an enabler for up-and-coming builders and a significant instrument that may assist cut back the educational curve.
“Earlier than we had these AI growth instruments, a junior developer simply popping out of college would sit along with a senior developer and go over code,” he says.
“That’s not what the senior developer desires to do. There’s one thing else he desires to do, he has quite a lot of issues to repair, however he is aware of that that is a part of making a worthwhile crew member, he must spend money on that.”
Reflecting on his time as a younger developer, Vogels famous a bent to “ask the identical query over and over”. With AI, nonetheless, junior builders have a possibility to deliver themselves up to the mark way more effectively.
“Now there’s these instruments we now have that may assist us in our each day life, and on this specific case, assist junior builders grow to be up to the mark and perceive giant code bases a lot quicker than it might have been previously.
“You possibly can provide out your senior builders to truly do the duties that they’re actually good at.”