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AI Programming

At Amazon, Some Coders Say Their Jobs Have Begun To Resemble Warehouse Work (nytimes.com) 199

Posted by msmash from the new-world-order dept.
Amazon software engineers are reporting that AI tools are transforming their jobs into something resembling the company's warehouse work, with managers pushing faster output and tighter deadlines while teams shrink in size, according to the New York Times.

Three Amazon engineers told the New York Times that the company has raised productivity goals over the past year and expects developers to use AI assistants that suggest code snippets or generate entire program sections. One engineer said his team was cut roughly in half but still expected to produce the same amount of code by relying on AI tools.

The shift mirrors historical workplace changes during industrialization, the Times argues, where technology didn't eliminate jobs but made them more routine and fast-paced. Engineers describe feeling like "bystanders in their own jobs" as they spend more time reviewing AI-generated code rather than writing it themselves. Tasks that once took weeks now must be completed in days, with less time for meetings and collaborative problem-solving, according to the engineers.

At Amazon, Some Coders Say Their Jobs Have Begun To Resemble Warehouse Work More | Reply

At Amazon, Some Coders Say Their Jobs Have Begun To Resemble Warehouse Work

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  • It was fun while it lasted (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ihadafivedigituid ( 8391795 ) on Monday May 26, 2025 @11:58AM (#65404833)
    I made my first money as a teenager writing code in 1980. After Y2k I became the guy who gets called in to save the day when the overpaid teams are flailing. I made a very good living at it for a while. I'm not the best, but I'm pretty fucking good and I have a lot of experience to guide me.

    I am forced to admit that our new robot overlords are better than me and rapidly improving. Thank $DEITY I'm in a position to retire. Best of luck to those still working in the field.
    • It's a handful of greasy dudes that blundered into billions of dollars though a combination of nepotism, antitrust violations and government handouts.

      They maintain their power by tricking us with moral panics and Petty bigotries and we let them do it because reasons.
      • I rarely use any of the proprietary AI services. Nearly all of my LLM inference is done locally with free range, organic, non-GMO open weight models.

        The genie is out of the bottle. The good news is that the greasy billionaire dudes don't control the genie like we thought they would a couple of years ago.
        • Of course they control it. It doesn't matter if you can run an open source LLM model. If you don't have a multi-million dollar Data center to run those queries you don't have control they do. And you won't have access to the capital you need to run that data center because we haven't been enforcing antitrust law so they will just shut you out of it.

          You're thinking about power to linearly. You're thinking that if you have access to a technology that you have power over that technology. It doesn't work li

          • If you don't have a multi-million dollar Data center to run those queries you don't have control they do.

            Did you not understand what I wrote?

            Nearly all of my LLM inference is done locally ...

            Emphasis added for the reading impaired. I am running these models on my laptop, which is a $2,400 Macbook Pro--nothing super special. Performance is amazing and rapidly improving; new open weight models are being released almost faster than I can try them out.

    • >> our new robot overlords are better than me and rapidly improving

      Oh yeah. I can write pretty decent code but I can't do it with the entire corpus of open source software and all the question-and-answer forums at my instant disposal. Or generate a possible solution to a large objective in a couple of minutes.

      At some point in the foreseeable future software development will consist of making some facial expressions while everything is being generated for you. Once in a while you will grunt out somethi

  • Poor babies (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Slashythenkilly ( 7027842 )
    If sitting at a desk typing in code all dsy resembles warehouse work to you- youve never done warehouse work.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by quall ( 1441799 )

      There is more of a chance that they've done warehouse work, than there is a chance that you've done coding. Dumb statements like yours tell it all.

      The article is specifically about not coding, and instead is about mundane, fast-paced work with timely quotas using AI instead. They used to use their brain to think about and code around problems. Now they're reviewing code and clipping it together so that it works, under a figurative whip. Monkey work.

    • Indeed. Some of us have actually done warehouse work.

    • You're being obtuse, that wasn't the point being made.

    • From the article, AI coding is considered by the executives a full replacement for creating code.

      The old way, and in use by some today, was to create code by hand, similar to writing a story. Your mind created it. Then add autocomplete, which most of the time saved on typing, but sometimes interrupts the train of thought.

      Now, instead of creating, you get to assemble AI generated snippets, with what amounts to productivity quotas.

      The worst part for the Dev and QA teams will come later, when the AI generat

    • I've loaded trucks for a living. I've done logistics for a living. I've done software for a living. Plenty of software work is very much like warehouse work.

      • Sure buddy, sweat pouring down your face, back and feet killing you, punching a clock...see if you last 4 hours doing what amazon warehouse workers do

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by reanjr ( 588767 )

          Amazon workers couldn't handle what I had to do at RPS.

        • Yea, but let me ask you something. When you come in on Monday, and you're not feelin' real well, does anyone ever say to you, 'Sounds like someone has a case of the Mondays'?

    • Have people lost the ability to understand simple metaphors recently, or is it just you?

      Again, slowly, they are not saying that the two things are the same thing... they are using one as a metaphor for the changes made to the other.

  • Back then there were not very many of us and even fewer who were good at it. Based on the laws of supply and demand, we were paid well. Then the word spread that software engineering paid well and a flood of people of varying talent jumped in. Now, powerful tools are making the job easier. Change is coming and the best of the best will adapt and thrive. The others, not so much

    • I think you are unaware of how significant the threat to labor is.
      I do a signficant amount of technical writing- reports, proposals, etc...
      Relative to most engineers, I am pretty good at it and it has helped my career signficantly, but it didn't just happen overnight. It was the results of 12 years of K-12 language arts education, plus college, technical writing in college, and then writing as a graduate student.
      Recently, I have accepted the fact that this is now a useless skill because AI tools are far bet

  • Is the code being tested to the extent it was before LLMs came into use? Or has "move fast and break things" devolved to "put shit out there and don't worry - it will be obsolete before anyone has a chance to complain about how terrible it is"?

    • If your business can't be described as "end-stage" yet, someone trying to win the race to the bottom will probably buy it from you.

      "Put shit out there and don't worry" isn't just becoming a way of life in programming, but the entire business world, and the society at large.

  • Let us know when they don't get to go to the bathroom, then it'll be like doing warehouse work for Amazon.

    • This might seem like a good comparison, but there's a key difference in that salaried intellectual work doesn't have strictly quantifiable output metrics. You can find yourself in a position where a feature, once explored in depth is really a rats nest of features. Developers can poop or pee, but they may find themselves under immense pressure to deliver something where a project manager has underestimated the effort required to complete it. The developer then finds themselves virtually shackled to a chair

  • Whiplash (Score:5, Funny)

    by evslin ( 612024 ) on Monday May 26, 2025 @12:24PM (#65404913)

    > Tasks that once took weeks now must be completed in days, with less time for meetings and collaborative problem-solving, according to the engineers.

    Amazon, pushing RTO: you need to spend more time collaborating face to face with your coworkers!

    Amazon, pushing AI: you need to spend less time collaborating face to face with your coworkers!

  • Great timing (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dskoll ( 99328 ) on Monday May 26, 2025 @12:25PM (#65404915) Homepage

    I retired from a long career in software development two years ago.

    Looks like my timing was awesome. I would absolutely hate to be looking for a software development job now. The tech industry has jumped the shark.

    Now I just happily work on my hobby projects, making software the way I like to make it and nary an AI assistant within 100km.

    • Re: Great timing (Score:5, Insightful)

      by devslash0 ( 4203435 ) on Monday May 26, 2025 @12:32PM (#65404925)

      You may be onto something. Perhaps the future is in simply being a plumber or an electrician wiring up data centres; the types of jobs that can't be (yet) done safely be robots and AI.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dskoll ( 99328 )

        Yep, I think going into the trades is a good plan, or personal care such as a health care assistant or masseur/masseuse. Those professions still need humans (for now...)

        • You have clearly not sat in a modern massage chair. A massage therapist friend of mine has one, and it's amazing.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by dskoll ( 99328 )

            I have, and I've also had professional massages. There is no comparison.

            • Modern, I said. There is a comparison: the chair can run custom routines and doesn't get tired or expect a tip. They are astounding, but not cheap!

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by dskoll ( 99328 )

                Well, it was pretty modern, but maybe not top of the line.

                Still, if you have a specific medical condition or muscle problem, you can discuss it with a person and get customized and appropriate treatment. I would trust that a lot more than a chair that lets you select a few options.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dargaud ( 518470 )
          Except that those jobs pay like pure shit.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by dskoll ( 99328 )

            The trades pay pretty decently---you can make a very nice living as a plumber or electrician. Medical aid jobs pay like shit because most of the people doing them are women, and women are underpaid.

            I have a friend who's a massage therapist and she charges over $100/hour. Sure, there's overhead and such, but I bet she clears at least $40-$50 per hour, which is not terrible.

    • Nah, just because huge tech companies are terrible employers, doesn't mean that software development jobs everywhere are crap. There are still plenty of companies, especially smaller ones, that still care about their people.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by dskoll ( 99328 )

        Yes, this is true. My last job before retirement was at one such small company, and it was a fantastic place to work. However, those companies are becoming harder to find and are being squeezed out by the massive oligarch-run companies, and/or are buying into the AI bullshit because everyone else is.

        • Maybe you're not looking in the right places. According to the US Chamber of Commerce, small businesses are booming in the US. https://www.uschamber.com/smal... [uschamber.com].

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by dskoll ( 99328 )

            Well, I'm not looking at all, because I am retired, and I don't live in the US.

            And while small businesses may be booming, how many of them need software developers? Especially Linux developers? (I would never touch Windows...)

            • So yes, if you start constraining the criteria to a very narrow slice of the software development world, then yes, you'll probably have a hard time finding work (if you weren't retired). The vast majority of enterprise software development is on Windows, and that's where most of the jobs are, especially in small business. Linux tends to be used only by major corporations that can afford the extra maintenance effort required for Linux.

              There are small software development shops everywhere. There's literally o

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by dskoll ( 99328 )

                There are a fair number of small Linux shops too... I owned one for 19 years. And I would change your wording to read "the perception of extra maintenance effort required for Linux..."

                However, even the small shops are prone to the AI hype and all the bullshit trends that periodically sweep through the software industry. For me, it all started to go wrong when the obvious joke that is "Agile" began to be taken seriously.

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by dskoll ( 99328 )

                  Oh also... embedded work is almost all Linux (or bare metal). There are lots of IoT businesses out there doing stuff with embedded Linux.

                • I can see that we are on opposite ends of the dev spectrum. I'm a Windows guy (though I've spent several years doing Linux too), and I wholeheartedly buy the "agile" mindset. In fact, I'd go so far as to assert that waterfall teams that are successful, are actually doing agile under the hood. I refuse to work in a waterfall shop, full stop.

  • ... with less time for meetings ...

    So how is this a bad thing? What engineer wants to spend soul-sucking time in meetings (with managers, marketing, etc.).

  • But it doesn't matter if AI works or not.

    Your boss is going to replace you with AI. If the AI works and you're one of the survivors then you get to gradually wait it out until the AI completely replaces you.

    If the AI doesn't work and you're one of the survivors you will be forced to work twice as hard or you'll get fired and replaced by one of the thousands of people they just laid off.

    This is what happens when you stop enforcing antitrust law. In the old days companies firing this many engineer
    • Yes, you do indeed keep saying this, over and over in almost the exact same words, and hardly anybody ever responds. Have you ever wondered why? Well, maybe because everybody here is tired of you posting the same ideas over and over and has stopped reading your posts. And, of course, there's the possibility that you're completely wrong and most posters here are tired of pointing this out.
  • The "editors" clearly do not care about their work.

    Replace them.

  • Can AI write usable, performance, quality code? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Murdoch5 ( 1563847 ) on Monday May 26, 2025 @12:53PM (#65404971) Homepage
    Honest question, can AI write usable, performance, quality code? All these teams scaling back, and using AI, what tools are they using? I spent a good portion of last week doing LLM training for a coding AI, that I want to use locally. It was already trained, so I was feeding in my code, and trying to get it to generate the same standard of code. As of last night, the 25th of May 2025, having spent 50+ hours, of training using my own code bases, it couldn't produce a reasonable large code block, commented, with annotation.

    The best it produced, was a Jr Dev style function, that lacked readability, maintainability, wasn't commented properly, lacked annotation, and had it have been deployed, could have easily been a project stopper. If AI can't generate quality code, that's readable, maintainable, understandable, annotated, and designed to be a living body of work, what's the point?

    I've been a professional developer / engineer for 13+ years, worked on more code bases than I can count. I've seen good code, I've seen meh code, and of course, I've seen dump trucks of bad, terrible, horrible code. When the code is bad, and you can't just read it with understanding, hours, days, even weeks get wasted having to reverse the code, so you can fix it, or change it. Recently, I can across a calculation in an old code base, that a former coworker wrote, 4 years ago:

    (4 - Math.sqrt(MiddlePoint / 6.25)) / 4;

    That's the line, I copied it, what is 4? Where does 6.25 come from? Unless you know those two values, that statement makes no sense. There were no comments, no annotation, the commit message was useless, all I knew is what it should have done, but even that had no documentation. It took 2 days, to unwind that one line, which is now commented and annotated, with examples in the code, but that's the type of nonsense AI generates, and it's useless.

    All this AI stuff, it might speed up timelines now, but when it comes time to work on that code later, you're screwed, and as I've done many, many times in the past, your rushed nonsense today, it's going to take me hours, days or weeks later, to clean up. If you've never seen the code base, and you sit down, there should be enough comments and annotations that you, having no knowledge, can get up to speed on what everything is doing, what it's trying to do, why it's doing it, and even what the variables are for, with examples in the code. I honestly think at least 50% of the code base, should be added in comments, and honestly, I've had 60% even 70% because the more information you leave, the better off everyone else is later.

    • A lot of people are swearing up and down that AI can write working code on this site.

      If it can, isn't it by definition doing something that's been done a bunch of times before? And that one really shouldn't have to be doing again?

      • No, it isn't *exactly* code that has been done a bunch of times before. And that's the key -- the LLM is able to generate *similar* code to what has been done before. Lots of rooms in the world have been painted, but people still have to paint a particular room, with all its nooks and crannies, taping the edges of doors and moving the furniture out of the way. Code has been largely that -- yes, code A is very similar to code B, but it isn't exactly the same between two apps, and so it wasn't in a library or

    • Recently, I can across a calculation in an old code base, that a former coworker wrote, 4 years ago:

      (4 - Math.sqrt(MiddlePoint / 6.25)) / 4;

      That's the line, I copied it, what is 4? Where does 6.25 come from? Unless you know those two values, that statement makes no sense.

      Completely aside from the AI discussion... I absolutely hate it when I have to do data archaeology / forensics just to suss out exactly what some predecessor was trying to do and why they wrote it the way they did. Sheesh, when I haven't commented my own code sufficiently, I have a hard enough time remembering what I was thinking myself, 12 months after the fact!

      • This reminds me of a time, decades ago, when I was doing a bit of maintenance coding for a small business. One small task I was given required searching a static table for a magic number to plug into a calculation. Just because I could, I wrote it as a binary search instead of the linear search that the other coders who'd worked on this would have used. As I doubted that the next person to see this would understand what I'd done, I included exactly one comment at the beginning of the function: "If you do
        • I HATE those comments, I constantly see them in one paraphrased form or another. No offence, but why not just comment the code block in its entirety instead of being lazy? I'll give you a possible out, in some older Microchip compilers, you could mess up the stack by adding commenting, so you had to keep the comment length the same as the original code, or you could change the output. That caused many wonderful issues.
          • If you know what a binary search [wikipedia.org] is, you'll understand that it's a very simple algorithm, and the code should be very easy to follow. However, judging only by the existing code, whoever wrote it, or worked on it before wasn't at all skilled. Putting that comment in gave future code monkeys fair warning that there was more in that function than met the uneducated eye.
            • Okay, fair description, and that shit scares the hell out of me because when it's 10pm on the night before launch, and you need to modify that function because someone screwed up and forgot something important, you don't want to play bomb defuser! When I find shit like that, I fork the branch, and start to unwind it, until I understand each bit of the logic, in it's entirety, then put it back together, clean it up, and polish it.
      • I only figured out what 6.25 meant, well, doing a massive commenting phase, where I broke down every single step to its basic most elementary form, and built it up in stages, and doing a calculation to show how it should work, 6.25 popped out. Once I knew what that was coming from, the 4's made sense, but it took 200+ lines of comments to figure that out, it was so obscure.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by allo ( 1728082 )

      "(4 - Math.sqrt(MiddlePoint / 6.25)) / 4;"
      AI wouldn't write that. AI rather tends to over-structure and overcomment things. You can recognize AI code because it look like from a tutorial // this is the main loop
      while(!end) { // here the values will be computed
      do_something(); // now we do something else
      do_something_else()) // set the loop variable
      end = is_it_end();
      }

      It won't do the "i++ // increments by 1" thing, but it seems to really like to have many short secti

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by allo ( 1728082 )

        Slashdot killed the formatting. Imagine each comment a line below where it currently is.

        • It wouldn't write it the same way, but it would still be useless from an understanding standpoint. There are ~50 lines of comments explaining that one line, including what 4, and 6.25 mean, and how to recalculate them in different scenarios.

  • Are the feelings of economists the reason we can't print a generous basic income and fully index the economy to adapt to nominal inflation?

  • time to go union!

  • Blatantly duplicate story (Score:3)

    by substance2003 ( 665358 ) on Monday May 26, 2025 @01:32PM (#65405061)
    Did the moderators not notice this was already posted [slashdot.org] barely a little over 12 hours ago?

  • So? (Score:2)

    by jvkjvk ( 102057 )

    If they can do it, and it seems to be working, so what?

    It's called productivity increasing due to technology. So they should be delighted.

    No? Why not?

    They aren't working more hours for the same pay to get it done, are they? I don't think so.

    Why would this technology be unlike every other technology, and not spur *more* development, in the end?

    • There's a constant question of the rate of tech change. When tech changes job over the course of a decade, no one really complains -- in fact, people tend to get excited over the new bits. When a job changes radically in the course of a year, there's panic. The difference is the human scale activities *around* a job. Most people aren't going to be retrained for the new environment. Those new jobs? Those are for the kids coming out of school trained in the new shiny not the folks in their 40s. Folks in their

  • Ai manager (Score:3)

    by Fons_de_spons ( 1311177 ) on Monday May 26, 2025 @02:07PM (#65405167)
    Why is AI only replacing the "low" executive jobs? I bet it would flourish in a management position. Report writing, arguing, selling, convincing, hiding failures in big clouds of fancy words, ...

  • managers pushing faster output and tighter deadlines while teams shrink in size,

    Just like every job I've worked, ever.

    Until there's some sort of penalty for managers asking for more while giving less, managers are going to keep asking for more and giving less.

    Pro tip: Nearly everyone in every company is behind schedule, and yet, those companies that are on schedule and on budget haven't dominated the market. From this we can conclude, that meeting your bosses' schedule isn't actually that important.

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