Amazon Q and The Future of Autonomous Development | AWS' Adnan Ijaz

**Andrew Zigler** (0:07)
Welcome back to Dev Interrupted, everyone. I'm your host, Andrew Zigler.

**Dan Lines** (0:12)
And I'm Dan Lines. Awesome to be here.

**Andrew Zigler** (0:15)
We have an amazing conversation ahead of us today. I sat down with Adnan Ijaz, one of AWS top product leaders. He's driving Amazon Q. It's practically a household name for developers already. It's only two years old, but it's already made so much impact. I was at reInvent actually when they announced it, and the reception in that room was really crazy. It was a lot of positive feedback from everybody there. And now it's reshaping how people are building things, they're shipping software, how they're scaling. So it's been, for me, a real big blast to come full circle, bring Adnan on to Dev Interrupted, talk about how teams are actually using and adopting these kinds of tools. And you know, Dan, I'm sure you've seen and heard Amazon Q out there in the wild.

**Dan Lines** (0:59)
Yeah, for sure, definitely from the developer perspective. Were you there two years ago? I think it came out, or like it was announced in 2023, right?

**Andrew Zigler** (1:07)
It was in 2023 at reInvent in Vegas.

**Dan Lines** (1:10)
Yeah. Yeah, that's awesome. I see also they're expanding, I guess, Amazon Q to not only development teams. I know they're probably crushing for development teams, but I saw it's also like, okay, use this across your entire business. Let's just make everything AI.

**Andrew Zigler** (1:26)
Yeah. Yeah. And we're going to talk about some of like, what's that secret formula that they're able to use to really scale and have that much success with it. And every day at Linear B, you help engineering teams to automate stuff and fix things that are slowing them down, whether it's like updates or streamlining pull requests. And I know you got an early listen on our conversation with Adnan. I'm sure you have lots of ideas in your own head about the things he talked about, which were all really fascinating. So let's go ahead and jump in. Last time you and I talked, we talked about Dr. Ashore's episode from IBM. And you talked about how AI is coming up in like 8 or 9 out of 10 customer calls you're on every week. I imagine that's probably still the case.

**Dan Lines** (2:08)
I think it's super interesting because of course, it's still coming up, but the narrative I would say is shifting and the questions that are being asked are changing. And I think the last time you and I talked, it wasn't even that long ago. It's coming up, but now most of the questions, because people have been dabbling with AI and they're using point solutions, maybe it's like coding assistance, maybe it's something else. Most of the talk now is not around like, should I use it or not? Or like maybe how to, it's more like, what did it do for me? Did I get any productivity gain? I owe this back to my business. I spent a lot of money and I need to report on that. Where I see the narrative has shifted is more from the early excitement with this untapped potential of what AI could do to transform my development organization, a little more towards outcome. What did it do for me? How can I prove it? What should I do next?

**Andrew Zigler** (3:11)
I think they're really pointing out a really big thing that Adnan even talks about, about aligning people within your organization with their expectations of what you're going to get out of it. And something he points out is maybe that workflow that you're trying out, that AI workflow, isn't going to give you that 100% completely done thing that you were hoping and imagining and kind of even counting on it to do. But if it's giving you that 60 or 70% is giving you a massive head start and understanding how to use that head start. So it really starts also with resetting those conversations internally about expectations. And I know you've worked with lots of leaders who have definitely been burned by hype, other people who have really nailed it in the moment. What do you think differentiates them?

**Dan Lines** (3:56)
Let's say a few things here. So one with Adnan, the conversation is just amazing and he's pointing out a few things that I'm also hearing from customers. So I wanted to highlight those first and then we'll talk about maybe what the best DevEx teams are doing and that type of thing. So he's speaking to, let's make sure that we can confirm a quick win or confirm a win, meaning, okay, let's say AI could do anything for you. Narrow it down, I think he talks about documentation or the code review. Pick something very pointed even though it can do anything and say, I'm looking to get a win here and let's just say that it is documentation for developers because developers don't like to write documentation.