Welcome to TechBrief, I’m your host. Today, we’re talking about how AI is turning Amazon’s software engineers into the equivalent of warehouse workers. As Cory Doctorow explains in Pluralistic, many coders have become “reverse-centaurs,” forced to review AI-generated code under brutal time pressure. Instead of solving complex problems, they race to catch errors that are nearly impossible to spot. Doctorow calls this role the “human in the loop” and warns that these developers become what Madeleine Clare Elish calls a “moral crumple zone,” taking the blame for bugs they never wrote.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy even boasts that AI has delivered “the equivalent of 4,500 developer-years.” But this “productivity” comes at the cost of worker power and product quality. Coders describe relentless “speedups,” swapping creativity for endless line-by-line vetting. It’s a stark reminder that automation isn’t just about efficiency—it’s a tool for disciplining labor. That’s the real lesson from Amazon’s reverse-centaur experiment, and why workers and consumers alike should pay attention.
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