Amazon’s CTO on how developers can ride the AI-powered coding wave

Software engineering is going through its most dramatic transformation in years.

Welcome to Eye on AI. Beatrice Nolan here. In today’s issue:

• Amazon’s CTO on the AI coding revolution.
• All the news from AI for Good.
• SpaceXAI launches Grok 4.5.
• And OpenAI says a key benchmark is broken.

I’ve been on the ground in Geneva this week at the UN’s AI for Good Summit. 

The Summit is meant to bring together governments, industry leaders, researchers, and civil society to explore how AI can be harnessed to address global challenges and advance the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. The conversations on stage ranged from how to tackle a growing AI divide between the global north and the global south to technical solutions for mitigating AI risks like models engaging in deception and sycophancy.

Before the Summit, global leaders gathered at the UN’s Global Dialogue on AI, the first intergovernmental AI governance summit to bring all 193 UN member states together to discuss potential international rules for controlling the technology.

The UN chief António Guterres used the event to appeal for worldwide AI regulation, particularly when it comes to lethal autonomous weapons, as AI technology increasingly shifts from civilian use to the battlefield. (It’s not the first time the UN has attempted to put some controls on autonomous weapon use—Guterres first raised the alarm over lethal autonomous weapons in a 2023 policy paper, calling for a legally binding treaty banning “killer robots” by 2026. That deadline has now passed with no treaty in place.)

Also a recurring issue on the table at the Summit: creatives asking for a seat at it.

Björn Ulvaeus, best known as co-founder and member of Swedish pop group ABBA, kicked off the proceedings on Tuesday, arguing that AI wouldn’t exist without creatives like him. Several speakers followed with various appeals for tech companies to recognize that contribution.

On policy and governance: Salesforce’s Marc Benioff and Microsoft’s Brad Smith pushed back on the idea that recent export controls imposed on Anthropic’s Fable 5 model were explicitly aimed at blocking foreign nationals from American AI. 

Both Benioff and Smith said the U.S. government was trying to address real-world national security concerns, rather than trying to deprive foreign nationals of the model. That said, the U.S. government’s actions have caused panic across Europe, where politicians worry they’re losing control over a fundamental technology.

I also spoke with Amazon’s chief technology officer, Werner Vogels, who laid out his roadmap for software engineers trying to navigate through the AI boom currently disrupting their industry. 

The rise of the “renaissance developer”

Software engineering is going through its most dramatic transformation in years. At the center of the shift are AI coding tools like Claude Code that can generate software with natural language prompts, reducing the need for engineers to write it line by line. Also known as “vibe-coding,” the process also allows non-engineers and novices to spin up prototypes in minutes, although this has been done with varying degrees of success.

According to Vogels, these new capabilities are making the ability to successfully review and fact-check code more important than ever. Someone still has to catch what the model gets wrong, he told Fortune, especially when regulated industries or safety-critical systems are involved.

“You can’t say to the regulator, oh, AI made a mistake,” he said. “That doesn’t work like that.”

How to be successful in this new era of software engineering? Vogels thinks that means becoming what he calls a “Renaissance developer”—his term for engineers who combine deep technical expertise with broad, cross-disciplinary curiosity, the way Leonardo da Vinci’s studies of anatomy and bird flight fed into his engineering and inventions. Vogels describes it as a “T-shaped” model: deep in one domain, but broad enough to understand the systems and people that domain serves. 

Even with his own engineers, Vogel says he advises them to take one afternoon a week away from their normal workload to read a paper or test a new tool. 

Is AI actually killing entry-level jobs?

There has been widespread concern about the rise of AI coding tools narrowing the number of employment opportunities for entry-level workers. However, according to Vogels, the anxiety around displacing junior engineers is primarily noise. “Every day is a new model, every day is a new system,” he said, adding that the pace of announcements—and geopolitical battles over which country’s models lead—leaves even him “confused at times.” 

His advice for junior engineers is to build skills beyond programming itself. When hiring, Vogels said he now weighs collaboration and teamwork over raw technical fluency—things like whether a candidate has worked on an open-source project or has an example of working well inside a team.

Programming languages, he said, can be picked up in a month or two once someone knows how to learn.

With that, here’s more AI news.

Beatrice Nolan
beatrice.nolan@fortune.com
@beafreyanolan

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com