Amazon’s Velocity Labs releases Strands Decider 2B model in under a week
Amazon Web Services’ new Velocity Labs team, formed in April with about 35 people, released an open-source AI model called Strands Decider 2B in less than a week. The model, based on Alibaba’s Qwen, helps AI agents make quick, narrow decisions like tool selection or request routing. Velocity Labs operates outside AWS’s traditional product-focused approach, prioritizing rapid prototyping in…
Key points
- Velocity Labs released **Strands Decider 2B**, a 2B-parameter decision-making model for AI agents, in under a week
- Model based on Alibaba’s open-source **Qwen**, released with training recipe on Oct 1
- AWS aims to hire **11,000+ new software engineers** this year despite AI-driven workforce shifts
The team’s speed stems from small, cross-functional groups of six to eight engineers and scientists, who collaborate closely. Marc Brooker, an AWS vice president leading the team, noted that 80%+ of Amazon developers now rely on AI agents for code generation, a shift from manual coding. However, Amazon has faced challenges, including an outage linked to AI-assisted coding errors and internal pressure to use AI tools. The company’s revised engineering guidelines emphasize outcomes over input metrics like code lines or token usage, though AI usage may still factor into performance evaluations.
Model pages: Jev → · Claude Code →
The story so far
3 episodes →- Amazon’s Velocity Labs releases Strands Decider 2B model in under a weekthis story
Amazon rewrites its software engineering playbook for an era when AI writes the code
geekwire.com · 3 November 2026
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