I can’t remember another talk that touched me as much as Amazon CTO Werner Vogels’ talk at the company’s annual event, which I had the pleasure of attending along with 60,000 other people a few weeks ago. More than an hour and a half of “show” that filled me with new ideas.
Vogels is one of the most influential figures in global technology. He is the key intellectual architect of AWS’s technology strategy, and many of his ideas from the last 20 years are standard in enterprise technology, such as cloud computing, distributed architectures and now AI agents. He ironized the oft-proclaimed “death of the system developer” by AI and doubled down on the bet with a new concept: “Renaissance Developer.” He said that just as in the Renaissance, which marked the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity, the influence of artificial intelligence could play a similar role today by 2026. He called for people, science and inventive curiosity to be the focus of this time. Although the guru was referring to developers, his five-step vision for all professions in the age of AI is worth considering. First he asked not to lose curiosityas it is the force that drives learning and invention and is a natural instinct of developers. “We need to protect our urge to break things down and understand things. It is important to have an experimental spirit that is not afraid of failure, because failure leads to learning,” he said.
His second idea was to think more in systems and not in silos. “The ability to understand the interactions of the entire system and not just its individual parts.” How small changes (he gave an example of predator reintroduction in Yellowstone Park) can change entire systems (river flow, vegetation). “It’s important to recognize that every service is part of a larger system, so any isolated change impacts everything we do.”
Third, develop the ability to communicate with machines using clear specifications rather than imprecise natural language. “Language is inherently ambiguous, but for AI to produce precise logic, we need to reduce the ambiguity.
Then emphasized the professional’s responsibility for quality. Even if the work is generated by AI, the ultimate responsibility always lies with the developer. “AI programming should be a technical process and not a game of chance, so careful review of the generated code is essential.”
Finally, he called for “T” polyglots with knowledge, knowledgeable in multiple areas.. With depth in their area of expertise (the vertical bar of the “T”) and extensive knowledge in other areas (the horizontal bar). “You can make better architectural decisions when you understand business and technology beyond your own area of expertise.” Good ideas for entering 2026, without so much trust in the “AI God” and more trust in our rebirth abilities for a new time.
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