In a recent interview with Stratechery’s Ben Thompson, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, 39, recalled that when he graduated high school, “the obvious tactical move was to become highly skilled at coding.”
Now, Altman states, “The clear tactical move is to become highly proficient in using AI tools.”
He’s not the only one. Many leading tech CEOs have pointed out that AI is improving at coding. Earlier this month, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted that AI could handle all coding tasks for software engineers within a year. Meanwhile, in January, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan that the company is working on AI capable of writing “a lot of the code in our apps.”
Altman told Stratechery that becoming proficient in AI tools is “the modern equivalent” of learning to code, noting that at least half of code authorship is already being automated.
“I believe in many companies, it’s likely already beyond 50%,” Altman said. “However, the real breakthrough will come with agentic coding, which no one has fully implemented yet.”
When asked directly whether his company would continue hiring software engineers, Altman acknowledged that there’s plenty of work for now. However, he noted that in the long run, the very AI they are developing could potentially shrink the job market.
“My basic assumption is that each software engineer will just do much, much more for a while,” Altman said. “And then at some point, yeah, maybe we do need less software engineers.”
