Amazon is asking software engineers to judge artificial intelligence by customer, business and team results, shaping how managers assess adoption and whether use improves delivery.
The revised guidance for software development engineers (SDEs) was written by Terk Terkowitz, vice president and distinguished engineer at Worldwide Amazon Stores. Amazon says engineering leaders developed it from observations of successful engineers, and asks staff to document situations where available AI tools do not improve their work.
The guidance identifies token consumption, AI adoption, code changes and code reviews as measures that track activity. Amazon says these indicators are deeply flawed as stand-alone measures of success because they do not capture what matters to customers, the business and teams. The company also says the measures have correlated with important outputs and can inform decisions when handled carefully. Turning them into targets, Amazon warns, could add costs or complexity.
Amazon advises managers to examine adoption around the 10th and 90th percentiles. Low adoption should prompt questions about obstacles, while concentrated use should lead managers to check whether teams are seeing delivery gains. The company says its frontier teams, which have embraced AI most, have recorded productivity and delivery gains, but gave no figures for those effects.
Amazon describes AI as changing software engineering more rapidly and fundamentally than earlier shifts such as cloud computing, microservices and serverless technology. It says AI practices are still evolving.
Technical and organizational leaders are expected to try the tools on production work and explain specific cases where they help or fall short. Terkowitz wrote that engineers should regard a lack of benefit as useful information: “If your work does not benefit from current AI tooling, that is a finding, not a failing.”
Amazon says the SDE role will keep evolving over the coming years as the company learns more about AI’s effects on its business and engineering practices. It gave no specific date for another update.
