I usually do not agree with the Amazon leadership (well, recently they haven't been "Right A lot"!)
But I agree with the following statement Matt Garman gave recently;
Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman said that using AI tools in place of junior employees was "one of the dumbest things I've ever heard" because these employees are "the least expensive" and "the most leaned into your AI tools."
It's because AI usually creates slop, without review these "slop" build up. We don't have infinite context window to solve the slop anyway. (even if we do, the context-rot has been confirmed)Also, on average, Indian non-Tech employees who manages thousands of spreadsheets or manually manages your in-store cameras are much more cheaper than the "tokens" and the NVIDIA GPUs you can throw at the problem, at least for now and a foreseeable future.
> It's because AI usually creates slop
I don't think his point was we should hire junior engineers because they're cheap and lean into AI and AI produces slop. His position is not that he wants to cheaply create slop.
He wants to hire people who are cheap and love using AI because he sees that as a better long term strategy than making senior engineers embrace AI late into their career.