"At Amazon, I was on the Amazon Q Developer team, building their AI coding assistant. You'd think being at the center of Amazon's AI developer tools would be exciting, but it was actually deeply frustrating. It was apparent to anyone outside the Amazon bubble that we were losing the AI game badly. The leadership was constantly playing catch-up because there was very little true product vision. They kept saying they wanted to move like a startup, but then had the risk tolerance of IBM."
"Everything took forever. AppSec reviews, design doc reviews, architectural review boards. By the time we shipped anything, companies like Cursor and Anthropic had already iterated through ten versions. We'd spend months debating whether a feature was safe enough to release while our competitors were shipping weekly updates based on actual user feedback. What really struck me was how Amazon's product decisions were driven by internal KPIs rather than user empathy."
I quit my job at Amazon in May to join a startup called Icon. At Amazon I worked on the Amazon Q Developer team, building an AI coding assistant. The environment was slow and frustrating, with little product vision and leadership playing catch-up. Lengthy AppSec, design, and architecture reviews delayed releases while competitors iterated rapidly. Product choices were driven by internal KPIs, exemplified by forcing Builder ID instead of GitHub auth, creating user friction. I felt I had reached a learning ceiling under those constraints. At Icon, the team ships features in days and operates at a markedly faster pace.
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