Welcome to AI’s Messy Middle: Where 36x Gains Require Distinguished Engineers

LAS VEGAS — Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman had a story to tell about Kiro, its new agentic IDE, in his keynote at AWS re:Invent.

A distinguished engineer at his company, Anthony, led a team that rearchitected a project in 76 days with six developers. They had initially expected it to take 18 months with 30 people. Eye-opening stuff, enough to make an engineering lead run to the agent vending machine.

Garman shared his story this fall with customers, who asked how Anthony’s team did it. That kind of question will be asked for a long…