"The robots generally haven’t displaced humans; Amazon said it has hired hundreds of thousands of warehouse workers since their introduction, while creating many new skilled roles. But the robots have increased the number of items each worker can pick to hundreds from dozens an hour.
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The Amazon engineers said this transition was on their minds as the company urged them to rely more on A.I. They said that, while doing so was technically optional, they had little choice if they wanted to keep up with their output goals, which affect their performance reviews.
The expectations have sped up rapidly. One engineer said that building a feature for the website used to take a few weeks; now it must frequently be done within a few days. He said this is possible only by using A.I. to help automate the coding and by cutting down on meetings with colleagues to solicit feedback and explore alternative ideas. (A second engineer said her efficiency gains from using A.I. were more modest; Amazon has more than 10,000 software engineers and different teams use the tools more or less intensively.)
The new approach to coding at many companies has, in effect, eliminated much of the time the developer spends reflecting on his or her work. “It used to be that you had a lot of slack because you were doing a complicated project — it would maybe take a month, maybe take two months, and no one could monitor it,” Dr. Katz said. “Now, you have the whole thing monitored, and it can be done quickly.”
As at Microsoft, many Amazon engineers use an A.I. assistant that suggests lines of code. But the company has more recently rolled out A.I. tools that can generate large portions of a program on its own. One engineer called the tools “scarily good.”"
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/25/business/amazon-ai-coders.html
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