Hard times are coming for programmers: Now, even the mail-order giant Amazon has released a tool that, according to its own claims, is completely written with software based on artificial intelligence (AI). Human developers have therefore contributed not a single line. Instead, the US company has applied thousands of so-called AI agents to the code – and published the result on Wednesday.
The software in question is an emulator that allows testing digital services of Amazon Web Services (AWS) locally on a PC – that is, without an internet connection to the Amazon Cloud. AWS is one of the world's largest providers of databases, servers, and online storage in the cloud. Companies such as the video streaming provider Netflix, the car manufacturer BMW, and the software manufacturer Adobe lease themselves into the data centers and thus store their technical infrastructure.
Amazon seems to be quite proud of the tool from the virtual developers. "The emulator was completely written by autonomous agents," writes the leading Amazon engineer Matthew Goldberg in a blog post about the creation of the emulator. "Our team wrote or checked not a single line of code." This was only possible because the AI bots had to follow certain security rules. According to Goldberg, they trusted that the AI bots would not cross these boundaries.
Reddit users call the tool "useless"
The tool was developed using the in-house agent development environment Kiro. The programming assistant provides results via text commands. Users simply describe how a document or a website should look and what should happen when a button is pressed. From the prompt, Kiro then creates specifications, code, and tests, which the user then checks. Goldberg developed the AWS tool in a similar way. For this, he sent three teams of AI agents into action: test programmers, bug hunters, and a correction team.
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