AI is increasingly becoming a headache for software engineers and coders, who fear it will replace them by automating their jobs. However, for one Amazon employee, AI played a far bigger role than many might expect. Anni Chen, a software engineer who has spent about three and a half years at the company, told Business Insider that most of the code she produces today is generated with the help of AI tools. Rather than slowing her career down, Chen says her ability to use AI effectively helped her move up the ladder faster inside the company.
The most important thing she said was, “AI helped me code, but more importantly, it helped with turning it into products. It’s the combination of grasping AI and translating it into scalable products that helped me get promoted faster.”
Who is Anni Chen?
Anni Chen joined Amazon in 2022 as a software engineer, which is an entry-level position, where she worked on the recommendations team responsible for systems that power product suggestion widgets. At the same time, generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and Claude began gaining attention, and she started experimenting with them during her work.
Initially she started experimenting with these AI models, but gradually they became a part of her daily workflow. Moreover, instead of turning to AI only when she got stuck, Anni Chen started using it as the first step whenever she needed help with a task.
“Now I would say almost 95 percent of the code authored by me is written by AI,” she said.
AI being used for coding at Amazon
Anni Chen says the change happened when she realized AI could help with more than small tasks. One of her early uses involved asking AI to “generate engaging titles for recommendation widgets.” The results encouraged her to explore how the tools could support more complex development work.
She said, “I started thinking, whenever I have a question or I want to code something up, I’ll just ask AI for help first before I attempt it.”
Over time, the AI-generated suggestions helped her produce code faster and approach problems differently. But Chen says the real advantage was not simply generating code quickly. Instead, she believes the key skill is knowing how to convert AI output into products that can work at scale.