AWS exec says great engineers should focus on problems, not solutions

Matt Wood, Chief AI and Technology Officer at Amazon Web Services, says great engineers in the AI era should focus on the problems they need to solve, not stick to one fixed method. Top engineers don't just use AI to write code—they also use it to dig deeper into problems and try different solutions.

Last month, Amazon released new job guidelines for software engineers, introducing the idea of a "Renaissance developer era." The guidelines no longer push engineers to use AI as much as possible. Instead, they value the long-term impact engineers bring to customers and the business. With AI generating code, engineers can spend more time on complex review work.

AWS Principal Engineer David Yanacek added that the best developers should be both "paranoid" and "lazy": happy to hand repetitive work to automation tools, while also careful enough to set safety limits so AI agents can run safely without constant supervision.