From AI-Assisted to AI-Native: Building a Frontier Development Team — Clare Liguori, AWS

Clare Liguori, a Senior Principal Engineer at AWS, reveals how Amazon teams are achieving 4.5x to 10x productivity gains through 'frontier development' with AI coding assistants like Kuro. She emphasizes that success isn't about the tools, but about fundamentally changing how engineers work, outlining five core habits: investing in agent context, embracing an initial slowdown for long-term speedup, feeding agents comprehensive instructions instead of micromanaging, making design intent explicit before coding, and shifting left with local, deterministic testing. Liguori also addresses new challenges like burnout and decision-making becoming the primary bottleneck in highly accelerated development cycles.