Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

While I agree with everything you said, Amazon’s problems aren’t just Kiro messing up. It’s a brain drain due to layoffs, and then people quitting because of the continuous layoff culture.

While publicly they might say this is AI driven, I think that’s mostly BS.

Anyway, that doesn’t take away from your point, just adds additional context to the outages.

> This isn't any different than the "person who wrote it already doesn't work here any more".

Yeah but that takes years to play out. Now developers are cranking out thousands of lines of “he doesn’t work here anymore” code every day.

In a chat bot coding world, how do we ever progress to new technologies? The AI has been trained on numerous people's previous work. If there is no prior art, for say a new language or framework, the AI models will struggle. How will the vast amounts of new training data they require ever be generated if there is not a critical mass of developers?

When I started my professional life in the 90s, we used Visual J++ (Java) and remember all this damn code it generated to do UIs...

I remember being aghast at all the incomprehensible code and "do not modify" comments - and also at some of the devs who were like "isn't this great?".

I remember bailing out asap to another company where we wrote Java Swing and was so happy we could write UIs directly and a lot less code to understand. I'm feeling the same vibe these days with the "isn't it great?". Not really!

As a former PM, I will say that if you want to stop something from happening at your company, the best route is to come off very positive about it initially. This is critical because it gives you credibility. After my first few years of PMing, I developed a reflex that any time I heard a deeply stupid proposal, I would enthusiastically ask if I could take the lead on scoping it out.

I would do the initial research/planning/etc. mostly honestly and fairly. I'd find the positives, build a real roadmap and lead meetings where I'd work to get people onboard.

Then I'd find the fatal flaw. "Even though I'm very excited about this, as you know, dear leadership, I have to be realistic that in order to do this, we'd need many more resources than the initial plan because of these devastating unexpected things I have discovered! Drat!"

I would then propose options. Usually three, which are: Continue with the full scope but expand the resources (knowing full well that the additional resources required cannot be spared), drastically cut scope and proceed, or shelve it until some specific thing changes. You want to give the specific thing because that makes them feel like there's a good, concrete reason to wait and you're not just punting for vague, hand-wavy reasons.

Then the thing that we were waiting on happens, and I forget to mention it. Leadership's excited about something else by that point anyway, so we never revisit dumb project again.

Some specific thoughts for you:

1. Treat their arguments seriously. If they're handwaving your arguments away, don't respond by handwaving their arguments away, even if you think they're dumb. Even if they don't fully grasp what they're talking about, you can at least concede that agents and models will improve and that will help with some issues in the future.

2. Having conceded that, they're now more likely to listen to you when you tell them that while it's definitely important to think about a future where agents are better, you've got to deal with the codebase right now.

3. Put the problems in terms they'll understand. They see the agent that wrote this feature really quickly, which is good. You need to pull up the tickets that the senior developers on the team had to spend time on to fix the code that the agent wrote. Give the tradeoff - what new features were those developers not working on because they were spending time here?

4. This all works better if you can position yourself as the AI expert. I'd try to pitch a project of creating internal evals for the stuff that matters in your org to try with new models when they come out. If you've volunteered to take something like that on and can give them the honest take that GPT-5.5 is good at X but terrible at Y, they're probably going to listen to that much more than if they feel like you're reflexively against AI.