'Maybe We Do Need Less Software Engineers': Sam Altman Says Mastering AI Tools Is the New 'Learn to Code' AI is already writing code at top companies, Altman says.
By Erin Davis Edited by Sherin Shibu
In a new interview with Stratechery's Ben Thompson this week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, 39, said when he was graduating high school "the obvious tactical thing was [to] get really good at coding."
Now, Altman says: "The obvious tactical thing is just get really good at using AI tools."
He's not alone, as many top tech CEOs have noted that AI is getting better at writing code. Earlier this month, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said that AI will write all code for software engineers within a year. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, meanwhile, told Joe Rogan in January that the company is developing new AI that will be able to write "a lot of the code in our apps."
Related: Amazon Cloud CEO Predicts a Future Where Most Software Engineers Don't Code — and AI Does It Instead
Altman told Stratechery that mastering AI tools is "the new version" of learning to code and that at least half of code authorship is currently being automated.
"I think in many companies, it's probably past 50% now," Altman said. "But the big thing I think will come with agentic coding, which no one's doing for real yet."
When asked outright if his company would still be hiring software engineers, Altman said that right now, there is plenty of work, but in the long run, the exact AI they are working on might end up thinning out 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."
