The anxiety among software developers that generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) will render human coders obsolete stems from a complex interplay of technological advancement and evolving job roles, which requires a deeper understanding of what a developer actually does.

That was the key message from Amazon’s chief technology officer, Werner Vogels, who noted that just as the Renaissance pulled Europe out of the Dark Ages by combining art, science and engineering, the AI era demands developers who can look beyond the code to the systems and people it serves.

“The renaissance developer is actually not about AI,” Vogels said during a briefing with Asia-Pacific media on the sidelines of AWS re:Invent 2025 in Las Vegas. “The renaissance developer is about how the developer needs to adjust when he gets new tools that are taking over particular tasks.”

And while doing so, developers must guard against the complacency of relying on AI-generated code without knowledge of the business context in which the technology operates.

“The AI doesn’t sit in budget meetings, where leadership debates whether to optimise for cost or performance,” Vogels wrote in an article for the AWS event newspaper The Kernel. “It doesn’t understand that the customer service system needs five nines of uptime while the internal reporting dashboard can go down during peak sales periods. It can’t read between the lines when a stakeholder says, ‘make it fast’, but really means, ‘make it cheap’.

“The politics, the constraints and the unspoken priorities that shape every technical decision are human nuances that require a developer who understands why it matters to the humans who pay for it and the humans that will use it,” he added.

Vogels likened the renaissance developer to Leonardo da Vinci, emphasising the need for developers to blend creativity, technical expertise and interdisciplinary knowledge, much like the famed Italian polymath who excelled in art, engineering and invention.

“Before Leonardo Da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa, he dissected cadavers to understand muscle structure, studied water flow to design canal systems, and observed birds to imagine flying machines,” he said. “Like the Renaissance greats who combined art, science and engineering, the developers who thrive in this AI-augmented world must become modern polymaths.”

Renaissance developers, he said, understand that systems are living, dynamic environments where changes ripple through services, application programming interfaces (APIs), databases, infrastructure and people. “They communicate with clarity that both humans and machines can build from. They own the quality, safety and intent of what they create, especially as AI grows more confident in its errors,” he added.

When asked by Computer Weekly if anything could be done to solve the hallucination problem with large language machines [LLMs], Vogels pointed to automated reasoning – a field of computer science distinct from machine learning that uses mathematical logic to prove systems are correct.

“Automated reasoning knows, for example, that a² + b² = c² is a triangle,” said Vogels. “If an LLM comes back with an answer that says, ‘This is a triangle’, but it doesn’t meet [that formula], it’s not a triangle.” This, Vogels suggested, is the future of software architecture: using logical guardrails to contain the hallucinations of generative AI.

Besides issues with hallucinations, current AI models also lack cultural nuance, which the renaissance developer must solve for.

For example, in healthcare, an AI-powered chatbot designed for pregnant women in the Netherlands, who expect direct medical facts, would fail if deployed without modification for someone in Kenya, who requires a different cultural engagement model, said Vogels. “We need to build different technology for the problem space,” he added, noting that only a human developer with cultural awareness can address the problem.

Becoming a renaissance developer also requires curiosity, a trait Vogels believes the education system often erodes. “We kill off curiosity quicker today than we did 1,000 years ago,” said Vogels, lamenting how the formal schooling system often forces conformity over creativity.

Ultimately, he argued that developers must stop viewing themselves solely as writers of code and start becoming solvers of true human problems, from loneliness in Japan’s ageing population to mapping flood zones in the Philippines. “Technology has a role to play,” said Vogels, but only if directed by humans who understand the problem.