How Prime Video's engineers manage agents, not code
Show notes
Prime Video serves over 300 million monthly customers across 240+ territories and 8,000+ device types. Lilia Abaibourova leads the AI-native transformation there. Prime Video started early, adopting CodeWhisperer as soon as it became available in preview, progressing through Amazon Q Developer, and now using Kiro to put agentic development in the hands of engineers, product managers, and designers. Romain sits down with Lilia to trace that journey — from CodeWhisperer preview to Amazon Q Developer and now Kiro — and explore MCP as the organizational inflection point: teams run two-person pods with full decision autonomy, while managers oversee fleets of agents instead of just headcount. Key takeaways: • Prime Video adopted AI coding tools from day one — CodeWhisperer in preview, then Amazon Q Developer, and now Kiro — building institutional muscle even when specific features were later sunset • MCP was the inflection point for organizational (not just individual) transformation — connecting disciplines end-to-end and eliminating handoff bottlenecks • Code generation is now effectively solved; the new frontier is verification, validation, and code review at scale • Team structures are being actively experimented with — from 2-person pods with full autonomy to larger teams where managers leverage agent fleets • The biggest anti-pattern: waiting on the sidelines for a standard instead of learning through experimentationWith Lilia Abaibourova, Principal Product Manager, AI-Native Transformation at Prime Video