In his lively DLD Munich 2026 talk, Amazon’s Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels describes why we’re entering a new era of “Renaissance builders” – innovators and software developers who blend curiosity, breadth, and depth to design for scale.
Vogels opens his talk with a playful time-travel video about the “end of the developer”, from COBOL to cloud computing to generative AI, each time showing that engineering remains essential. “All this AI stuff — will it take your job?”, he asks. “Maybe. But will it make you obsolete? Absolutely not! If you evolve.”
No matter how sophisticated the tools may become, accountability stays with the human, he argues. “You can’t say, ‘Oh, there was AI.’ It doesn’t work like that. All of the work is still yours.”
Vibe coding – writing software with the help of a chatbot – is “like gambling”, Vogels warns, because “these machines make mistakes”. But code is now produced faster than it can be verified, creating dangerous “verification debt.”
Watch the video for details and hear why Vogels believes the business world will see a move from I-shaped specialists to T-shaped professionals, who are experts in their field but also have broader set of skills.
