The new era of builders
Hear from the present generation of builders & learners what they think about programming and how does the present toolstack & challenges look like.
This June, in partnership with AWS, we ran three events in Mumbai & Bengaluru — the AWS Student Builder Mixers and Build with David. What came out of both was worth writing down.
Student Developers
We ran Student Builder Mixers in Bengaluru & Mumbai keeping the room deliberately small — around X Students joined us with a fireside chat with David Nalley and three breakout rooms students into: Open Source, Student Builders, and Communities.
Here's what each room surfaced.
Open Source Contributors
These are students who are active or interested in Open Source Contribution & Open Source Advocacy.
We learnt that most wanted to understand how to get started with Open Source, one of the most popular question for newcomers. Followed by discussion of popular and helpful programs. But both of these topic lead into mentorship and finding the right community in Open Source Software. The trend hasn't changed much for students when it comes to learning about the OSS ethos and practices, despite agentic contributions adding friction to first time contributors.
Student Builders
The Hackathon Winners, Startup Founders & Tinkerers.
Student builders went deep into specific categories and projects they are interested in building and used that as narrative to find optimal path to problem solving of various geography, theme, tool and topics.
Community Organizers
The student organizers & student Leaders who sat together to share their journey and hurdles as they represent their college, city and state. The discussions were focused on student interests, shared struggles of community leaders, working incentives for these leaders as part of their events & campaigns & the discipline of goood leadership.
Consistency beats intensity. Communities run on accountability and deadlines, not occasional bursts of energy. Acknowledge good work publicly. Address poor performance one-on-one, never in front of the group. Delegate to the most dedicated person, not the most available one — and stop wearing every hat, because it limits how far the whole community goes.
Public speaking is a near-universal gap. One leader had fixed this by running weekly online sessions where every student gets a guaranteed speaking slot, no exceptions. Small mechanism, outsized result.
The through-line: the skills you build leading a student community — event management, program management, delegation, conflict resolution — are directly transferable to industry. Running a community at this age isn't extracurricular. It's a head start.
What the Room Told Us About This Generation
Put the three breakout rooms together and a few things become clear.
This generation builds AI-native from year one. Students aren't treating AI as a subjec, they're integrating it into products, real stacks & real problems.
But the same room raised the honest counterpoint: over-reliance on AI agents may stop first-years from building foundational skills. When the agent writes the code, the scaffolding you'd normally build in your first two years, debugging instinct, understanding why something works, the ability to reason about a system without a prompt, risks never forming. The students raising this concern were first and second years themselves.
These builders ship faster and think at a higher level of abstraction earlier than any generation before them. The open question they're living inside is whether the foundations keep up with the abstractions.
David closed the evening by reflecting on exactly this — students already building like AI-native engineers, leading communities, representing India internationally. He pointed everyone to the AWS Builder Center as the place to keep building, learning, and connecting with the global community. AWS builder communities, he said, are a top global priority — with resources, programs, credits, and tools continuing to flow toward builders who show up.
Professional Developers
Build with David was the opposite of a structured event. No slides. No agenda. Just a room, coffee, and whatever you'd been meaning to work on. 50 developers joined us along with AWS dev advocates moving through the room to gather organic feedback on Kiro, helping builders get unblocked and work together to build with agents.
We handed out Kiro credits (using an check-in cron job built with Kiro itself!) to every Build with David attendee.
The format was minimal by design: a short welcome, a quick explanation of how the co-working would run, then three hours of heads-down building with the dev advocates circulating café-style. No enforcement of what tool you used. No structured sessions. Just builders and problems.
The most useful thing this format surfaces isn't what people say they want to build. It's what they actually open their laptops and work on when given three unstructured hours.
This co-working session allowed the attendees to spend time with their ideas and the AWS Developer Advocacy team to help validate & refine those ideas.
What We're Taking Forward
What we saw across both rooms points to something bigger than either event. Agents aren't a separate skill anymore, they're becoming part of how people learn, how they build, and increasingly, how they share what they've made. Students are treating an AI agent the way past generations treated Stack Overflow. even as they debate what it costs them in fundamentals. Professionals are using the same tools to move faster on real problems, and paying that forward.
If there's one thing worth taking from a mixer and a co-working session, it's this: the builder landscape right now isn't AI or fundamentals, mentorship or automation. It's builders figuring out how to hold both at once.
Huge shout out to the AWS team for supporting these events 🙌🏻
Never Stop Building