'Maybe we need less engineers...': Sam Altman just spelled out a chilling future for techies

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says the AI his company is building might eventually reduce the need for software engineers. Not immediately but the direction is clear. “Each software engineer will just do much, much more for a while,” he said. “And then at some point, yeah, maybe we do need less software engineers.”

In a wide-ranging interview with Stratechery's Ben Thompson, Altman, 39, said the tactical edge once came from mastering code. Now, it’s all about mastering AI.

“The obvious tactical thing is just get really good at using AI tools,” he said, contrasting it with the early 2000s when the goal was simply to be a good coder.

Altman revealed that in many companies, “at least half” of code is already written by AI. “I think in many companies, it's probably past 50% now,” he said, adding that the next leap—“agentic coding”—is still on the horizon. 

“The big thing I think will come with agentic coding, which no one's doing for real yet.”

He’s not alone. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently said AI will write all software code within a year. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg echoed that in January, telling Joe Rogan that AI will soon be generating much of the code behind their apps.

Sridhar Vembu, founder of Zoho, isn’t surprised. In a recent post on X, he wrote, “When people say ‘AI will write 90% of the code’ I readily agree because 90% of what programmers write is ‘boiler plate’.”

He drew on a distinction from The Mythical Man-Month, calling it the gap between “essential complexity” and “accidental complexity.”

“AI is doing a great job eliminating the accidental complexity. Humans still need to deal with the essential complexity,” Vembu explained.

But he also flagged a boundary AI may not cross: “Can it find totally new patterns?... I don’t know if AI can do this. I don’t know if that can be brute forced.”