Amazon CTO Werner Vogels foresees rise of the ‘renaissance developer’ in his final keynote at AWS re:Invent – News

As questions swirl around the impact that artificial intelligence will have on programming jobs, Amazon.com Inc.’s chief technology officer is departing the keynote stage for good.

Speaking on the final day of the AWS re:Invent gathering in Las Vegas, as he has done for the past 14 years, Werner Vogels (pictured) told the audience that, though he was not leaving Amazon, he would no longer deliver his annual keynote.

“It’s time for those different voices of AWS to be in front of you,” Vogels told the crowd. “This is my decision.”

Vogels took the opportunity during his hourlong address on Thursday to talk about what he characterized as “the other elephant in the room.” As low-code and no-code tools allow nontechnical users to generate digital solutions, there is a growing belief that programming jobs are going away and the role of a developer will change dramatically.

“Will AI take my job? Maybe,” Vogels said. “Will AI make me obsolete? Absolutely not… if you evolve. We evolve as developers and so must our tools.”

Embracing learning and invention

That evolution has given rise to what Vogels termed the “renaissance developer.” Much as in the Renaissance, a cultural movement that swept across Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries, captured the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity, the impact of AI could now do the same in 2026.

“We are again in a time of renaissance, and you are the new renaissance developer,” Vogels told the re:Invent gathering. “Creativity and technology evolve together. Curiosity leads to learning and invention.”

The renaissance developer by Vogels’ definition is curious, thinks in systems and communicates effectively. Developers are, or should try to be, a polymath, much like Leonardo da Vinci, who takes interest in the world around them and incorporates this in their work.

The developer is also an owner. “Vibe coding is fine, but only if you pay close attention to what is being built,” Vogels said. “The work is yours, not that of the tools. You build it, you own it.”

Need for human review

Amazon’s CTO stressed that the rise of AI has made human participation in code development even more important, particularly when it comes to code reviews. In a blog post prior to his keynote appearance, Vogels noted that while generative AI can provide code in seconds, “if you put garbage in, you get really convincing garbage out.”

In Vogels’ view, the AI-defined world has made the code review process more important than ever. “We all hate code reviews, it’s like being a 12-year-old and standing in front of the class,” Vogels said. “The review becomes the control point to restore balance. It is where we bring human judgement back into the loop.”

Vogels acknowledged a key distinction in today’s AI era compared with previous episodes of significant technological change. As new tools are introduced, they are having a ripple effect across other parts of tech industry, spurring an even faster pace of innovation.

“What makes this moment different is how these breakthroughs reinforce each other,” Vogels noted. “Progress in one field accelerates progress in other fields.”

Building for the future

A steady cadence of announcements from AWS this week underscored Vogels’ point. AWS unveiled new services for frontier model reasoning and frameworks to facilitate the building of AI agents.

Earlier on Thursday, the company debuted Graviton5, next-generation custom silicon that will offer up to 25% improved compute performance than its predecessor, according to AWS. Instances for cloud compute using the new chip are already in use by Adobe Inc., Airbnb Inc., Epic Games Inc., Formula One Group, Pinterest Inc. and SAP SE.

For his final keynote at the conference, Vogels returned to a theme that has been a common element over his 14 years of appearances: the developer’s hidden role. His view is that the work of developers is masked behind the technological machinery that drives today’s global economy, including the very engine that has propelled Amazon to become the second largest retailer in the world.

Wearing a t-shirt with the words, “Open mind for a different view And nothing else matters,” taken from a song by the heavy metal band Metallica, Vogels emphasized the importance of taking pride in what developers create as they toil in anonymity.

“Most of what we build, nobody will ever see,” Vogels said. “The only reason we do this well is our own professional pride in operational excellence. That is what defines the best builders.”

Photo: AWS/livestream