Some Amazon coders say their jobs resemble warehouse work

Since at least the industrial revolution, workers have worried that machines would replace them.

- Noam Scheiber

NEW YORK -

But when technology transformed automaking and even secretarial work, the response typically wasn't to slash jobs and reduce the number of workers. It was to "degrade" the jobs, breaking them into simpler tasks to be performed over and over at a rapid clip. Small shops of skilled mechanics gave way to hundreds of workers spread across an assembly line. The personal secretary gave way to pools of typists and data-entry clerks.

The workers "complained of speed-up, work intensification and work degradation", as labour historian Jason Resnikoff described it.

Something similar appears to be happening with artificial intelligence (AI) in one of the fields where it has been most widely adopted: coding.

At Amazon, which is making big investments in generative AI, the culture of coding is changing rapidly. In his recent letter to shareholders, chief executive Andy Jassy wrote that generative AI was yielding big returns for companies that use it for "productivity and cost avoidance". He said working faster was essential because competitors would gain ground if Amazon does not give customers what they want "as quickly as possible" and cited coding as an activity where AI would "change the norms".

Those changing norms have not always been eagerly embraced. Three Amazon engineers said managers had increasingly pushed them to use AI in their work over the past year. The engineers said the company had raised output goals and had become less forgiving about deadlines. It has even encouraged coders to gin up new AI productivity tools at an upcoming hackathon, an internal coding competition. One Amazon engineer said his team was roughly half the size it was in 2024, but it was expected to produce roughly the same amount of code by using AI.