--- title: "Amazon Programmers Say What Happened After Turn to AI Was Dark" description: "The shoehorning of AI into everything has programmers at Amazon feeling less like the tedious parts of their jobs are being smoothly automated, and more like their work is beginning to resemble the drudgery of toiling away in one of the e-commerce giant's vast warehouses. That's the bleak picture painted in new reporting from the New York Times, in which Amazon leadership, as is the case at so many other companies, is convinced that AI will jack up productivity. And who better to take advantage of the tech's magical properties than our aforementioned keyboard-clackers?  After all, there's all those wonderful […]" date: "2025-05-31" modified: "2025-05-31" authors: - name: "Frank Landymore" job_title: "Contributing Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/flandymore" url: "https://futurism.com/amazon-programmers-ai-dark" categories: - "Artificial Intelligence" tags: - "Amazon" - "generative ai" - "Programming" --- # Amazon Programmers Say What Happened After Turn to AI Was Dark ![Amazon engineers saying they're being forced to use AI while being told to do more work on even tighter deadlines.]() *\Image: Getty / Futurism\* The shoehorning of AI into everything has programmers at Amazon feeling less like the tedious parts of their jobs are being smoothly automated, and more like their work is beginning to resemble the drudgery of toiling away in one of the e-commerce giant's [vast warehouses](). That's the bleak picture painted in [new reporting from the *New York Times*](), in which Amazon leadership — as is the case at so many other companies — is convinced that AI will marvelously jack up productivity. Tasked with conjuring the tech's mystic properties, of course, are our beleaguered keyboard-clackers. Today, there's no shortage of coding AI assistants to choose from. [Google]() and [Meta]() are making heavy use of them, [as is Microsoft](). Satya Nadella, CEO of the Redmond giant, estimates that as much as 30 percent of the company's code is now written with AI. If Amazon's to keep up with the competition, it needs to follow suit. CEO Andy Jassy echoed this in a recent letter to shareholders, cited by the *NYT*, emphasizing the need to give customers what they want as "quickly as possible," before upholding programming as a field in which AI would "change the norms." And that it has — though this is less due to the merits of AI and more the result of the over-eager opportunism of the company's management. Three Amazon engineers told the *NYT* that their bosses have increasingly pushed them to use AI in their work over the past year. And with that came increased output goals and even tighter deadlines. One engineer said that his team was reduced to roughly half the size it was last year — but it was still expected to produce the same amount of code by using AI. In short, new automating technology is being used to justify placing increased demands at their jobs. "Things look like a speed-up for knowledge workers," Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard University, told the *NYT*, citing ongoing research. "There is a sense that the employer can pile on more stuff." Adopting AI was ostensibly optional for the Amazon programmers, but the choice was all but made for them. One engineer told the newspaper that they're now expected to finish building new website features in just a few days, whereas before they had several weeks. This ludicrous ramp up is only made possible by using AI to automate some of the coding, and comes at the expense of quality: there's less time for consulting with colleagues to get feedback and bounce ideas around. Above all, AI is sapping all the joy out of their profession. AI-amalgamated code requires extensive double checking — a prominent critique that can't be ignored here and is one of the main reasons skeptics question whether these programming assistants [actually produce gains in efficiency](). And when you're reduced to proofreading a machine, there's little room for creativity, and an even more diminished sense of control. "It's more fun to write code than to read code," Simon Willison, a programmer and blogger who's both an enthusiast of AI and a [frequent critic of the tech](), told the *NYT*, playing devil's advocate. "If you're told you have to do a code review, it's never a fun part of the job. When you're working with these tools, it's most of the job." Amazon, for its part, maintains that it conducts regular reviews to ensure that its teams are adequately staffed. "We'll continue to adapt how we incorporate Gen AI into our processes," an Amazon spokesman told the *NYT*. **More on AI:** *[AI Is Replacing Women's Jobs Specifically]()* ## Author At Futurism, my work has often centered on bringing a sense of clarity and insight to complex topics ranging from the regulation of emerging technologies to the esoteric ideologies of Silicon Valley executives, while striving not to lose the poetic sense of awe inspired by often-obscure fields like astrophysics and quantum computing. I broke the story of CNET using AI to produce articles that turned out to be riddled with factual errors and plagiarism — a dam-breaking inflection point, as I've reported, that's inspired copycats and endless discourse while beguiling stakeholders ranging from tech giants to purveyors of spam around the web. My work at Futurism has been cited by publications including CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, Vice, Gizmodo, Engadget, the Verge, and Vanity Fair. I grew up in locales ranging from India to China, and now live in the exotic suburbs of Virginia. In my free time, I'm an avid reader of weird sci-fi literature, an aficionado of East Asian cinema, and, regrettably, a relapsed gamer. Allegedly, I’m working on a debut novel, currently untitled. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()