Agents wrote AWS's new emulator in 29,684 commits. What is left for engineers?
AWS released an official emulator: a local copy of its services, so developers can test without paying for the real cloud. It got 848 points on Hacker News. Simon Willison notes it was written in Rust by a huge swarm of agents, with 29,684 commits in the first three weeks. A guest post by Swami Sivasubramanian on Werner Vogels' blog asks what the engineer's job becomes when agents write the code.
Other companies are already changing. Manus scrapped traditional coding interviews, cut engineer hiring to half its peak, and now has product managers writing code. In indie games, the studio Big Walk used AI to fix a bug, and many festival judges say any AI coding is too much. A Reddit post also says UK companies are scaling back hiring after overspending on AI.
Yesterday we asked if AI makes code fragile. Today the question is who reviews 29,684 commits.
The speed is impressive, but people still need to understand and check the code. Fewer engineers hired today can mean fewer experienced reviewers tomorrow. That is a jobs question and a safety question at the same time.
