‘As a software developer, you naturally need to have a willingness to learn’: Amazon CTO Werner Vogels on the evolution of software development in the age of AI

Software development has always been in a state of flux, according to Amazon CTO Werner Vogels. Whether it’s new tools, processes, or programming languages, over the years developers have had to evolve to meet changing demands.

With AI now in the equation and shaking up the industry, developers are once again forced to adapt to the changing nature of the profession.

It’s a topic that Vogels discussed at length during his keynote at AWS re:Invent 2025 in Las Vegas. The ‘Renaissance Developer’, as he described, captures the essence of the current state of affairs in the industry.

The Renaissance brought about sweeping social, cultural, and economic changes during the 15th and 16th centuries, and in the modern tech industry these same changes are unfolding. Speaking to ITPro at AWS Summit London, Vogels notes the term highlights that the industry’s ongoing transformation represents the “next step in the natural evolution of development”. Across his career, he’s witnessed sweeping changes.

“When I started off programming, I did that in VI or Emacs,” he says. “Then we got the first IDEs. Microsoft had these things where you could draw boxes on the screen and things like that.

“And now you have Cursor and Kiro and all the other tools, and there will be the next set of tools after that.”

To be a Renaissance Developer, Vogels explains that devs have to have an innate urge to explore new ideas, learn new things, and adapt to the changes unfolding around them.

“As a software developer, you naturally need to have a willingness to learn, to learn new stuff, because there's always something new around the corner,” he tells ITPro.

“Whether that is a programming language, whether it's an IDE, whether it is a new set of tools, whether it is a whole set of new applications that you couldn't build before.

“It’s a natural evolution over time, and I think this is probably also why software development is one of those areas that is continuously in flux.”

The changing face of software development

The influx of AI tools in software development over the last three years is transforming the industry. Indeed, the technology is now a mainstay for the majority of developers, with research from JetBrains last year showing that 85% use AI on a daily basis.

“Vibe coding” has surged in popularity, to the point where it was named the 2025 Word of the Year by Collins Dictionary. With these advances in AI, the prospect of fully automated software development has sparked some concerns.

Developers ranging in seniority, from junior to senior levels, have been bombarded with claims that AI could steal jobs and render them obsolete.

What has become clear is that developers will need to adapt to accommodate this influx of AI tools. Research from Gartner, for example, suggested that around 80% of devs and engineers will need to upskill or reskill in the coming years to compensate for the changes brought about by the technology.

No more “code monkeys”

Vogels tells ITPro that the traditional image of the developer as a “code monkey” simply producing code will fade as AI becomes increasingly common in daily processes.

That’s not to say developers won’t be needed, however. Other critical tasks such as quality assurance will still require human touch, creativity, and ingenuity. The institutional knowledge that developers have will also become increasingly important with AI in the picture, he added.

“With every tool that we get, we move away a bit further from the code monkey idea, the one that just types things, to someone whose uniqueness is a brain, who understands the bigger picture, who understands how this particular smaller function needs to fit into the bigger hole,” he says.

Vogels adds that one of the key aspects of being a Renaissance Developer is that they have to be a polymath with a deep understanding of both their craft and their role within the organization they’re a part of.

“You need to understand the complete picture,” he says. “Yes, you can be magic in databases, absolutely the best, spectacular developer, but you also need to understand the context in which this needs to be used.

“And you may even help your colleagues, because they may not understand everything about databases. So collaboration [and] communication, there’s a lot more emphasis on that than there may have been in the past.”

It’s here that developers are shifting from an operational role to more of a strategic one, overseeing automated development processes and keeping things running smoothly.

A key example of this transformation in action was detailed during the AWS Summit keynote. Ryan Cormack, principal engineer at Motorway, noted that AI was helping development teams produce code at a far more efficient rate. Using Kiro, AWS’ coding agent, the company is producing over a million lines of code every month. But with that comes more responsibility for developers, Cormack noted.

Reviews are more critical than ever to identify and remediate flawed code, which is proving to be a key issue in the age of AI-powered coding. In a 2025 survey from Aikido, 69% of security leaders, engineers, and developers revealed they had found serious flaws in AI-written code.

Vogels says the Motorway example is a “prototypical story” of how AI is helping both streamline development while adding new considerations and levels of complexity.

“Code reviews are not going to go away. Even though the tool may have generated the code, we as humans still need to be able to look at it and actually verify what has been built.”

“Now in that world, we’re getting lots of new tools as well that help us with that,” he adds. “I’ve seen several of our customers taking the output from one LLM and feeding it into another and saying, is that really true?”

Supporting the next generation

AI’s impact on entry-level roles has been a recurring talking point over the last 18 months. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei suggested half of entry-level “white collar” roles could be wiped out in the next five years, for example. In software development, the situation is no different, with concerns rising about the influx of AI tools reducing the need for junior developers.

As ITPro reported last year, AWS CEO Matt Garman poured cold water on these claims largely because enterprises require a talent pipeline that brings through the next generation of workers.

The developer talent pipeline in the UK has shown signs of stress in recent years, with research from Stack Overflow noting that the average age of devs stands at 39 years old. While the firm said this shows the workforce is “technically mature”, the study raised concerns about future talent and long-term international competitiveness.

Expanding on Garman’s comments, Vogels tells ITPro that he views AI as an enabler for up-and-coming developers and a vital tool that can help reduce the learning curve.

“Before we had these AI development tools, a junior developer just coming out of school would sit together with a senior developer and go over code,” he says.

“That’s not what the senior developer wants to do. There’s something else he wants to do, he has a lot of things to fix, but he knows that this is part of creating a valuable team member, he needs to invest in that.”

Reflecting on his time as a young developer, Vogels noted a tendency to “ask the same question over and over again”. With AI, however, junior developers have an opportunity to bring themselves up to speed far more efficiently.

“Now there’s these tools we have that can help us in our daily life, and in this particular case, help junior developers become up to speed and understand large code bases much faster than it would have been in the past.

“You can offer out your senior developers to actually do the tasks that they’re really good at.”