Six engineers. Seventy-six days. That’s what it took AWS to rebuild the inference engine behind Amazon Bedrock, its flagship AI service. The original estimate called for 30 to 40 engineers working 12 to 18 months.
The result is a new architecture called Mantle, or Project Mantle, designed to solve the capacity and performance bottlenecks that emerged as AI workloads on Bedrock exploded.
How six people did the work of forty
The secret ingredient was Kiro, Amazon’s agentic coding service. The tool generated specs, code, tests, and deployments, essentially acting as a force multiplier that turned a small senior team into something far more productive. AWS leadership has cited productivity gains of 10 to 20 times when skilled engineers harness agentic AI tools within controlled workflows.
Andy Jassy referenced the Mantle project in his 2025 shareholder letter, positioning it as evidence that Amazon practices what it preaches when it comes to AI adoption.
