The Stack Overflow Podcast Last week in AWS re:Invent with Corey Quinn
Dec 19, 2025
Corey Quinn, Chief Cloud Economist at Duckbill and author of Last Week in AWS, delivers his trademark snark at AWS re:Invent. He critiques the AI hype wave versus real-world adoption and warns against viewing AI as a mass layoff tool. The conversation dives into the evolution of AWS's focus on large enterprises over startups and the practical implications of managed services versus in-house solutions. Corey also reflects on the evolving roles in tech while emphasizing the need for human mentorship in a rapidly changing landscape.
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AWS Serves Enterprises And Solo Builders
- AWS has increasingly optimized for large enterprises while still shipping features that benefit solo builders and startups.
- Corey Quinn says AWS is big enough now to serve both enterprise and independent developers simultaneously.
Choose A Provider And Own It
- Pick a cloud provider and integrate with its services instead of chasing credits and portability myths.
- Treat infrastructure spend as secondary to developer time and optimize for your team's productivity.
AI Hype Outpaces Actual Buying
- AI is widely hyped and valuable, but adoption lags behind marketing and sales claims.
- Corey Quinn estimates AI gets things right about 80% of the time, making human supervision essential for risky use cases.