Is AI actually helping developers — or is it quietly making their experience worse? Recorded live at AWS Summit London, Romain is joined by Tomasz Ptak — AWS AI Hero and Senior Engineer at Duco — to tackle the uncomfortable question that many teams are avoiding. We explore the tension between AI-generated code velocity and the developer experience friction it can introduce — from context overload to broken feedback loops. The conversation draws on Werner Vogels' 'Renaissance Developer' keynote from re:Invent 2025, where he argued that developers need to be broader thinkers, not just faster coders. Tomasz shares his perspective on what good developer experience looks like in the AI era, why critical thinking about AI adoption matters more than blind acceleration, and how gamified learning through the AWS AI League is helping developers build real AI skills through competition. We also discuss the importance of psychological safety and vulnerability in engineering teams — drawing on Brené Brown's work — and why the best developer tools are the ones you barely notice, as Don Norman taught us decades ago. Whether you are a platform engineer designing internal tooling, a team lead evaluating AI assistants, or a developer wondering why your workflow feels harder despite all the new tools, this conversation offers a grounded, human-centered perspective on what we should actually be optimizing for.

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