Ten years from now, humans won’t touch code. Not because there will be less of it, but because there will be far more than we could possibly write by hand. The transition has already started, like at Google, where up to 75 percent of new code is now written by AI. The founders and startups I work with spend far less time writing code than they ever have before.
Most people intuitively conclude that this means less software engineering is required. I think it means the opposite. As the barriers to producing software drop, the amount we produce will explode. Every workflow too small to justify an “engineering team” becomes something anyone can build in an hour. We will have more software and more software products than at any point in history. Much of it will be built for 100 people, or 10, or just for yourself.
But I see the most surprising effects unfolding outside of software. Code has always been tied to the physical world through simulations, data, control systems, and more. The constraint used to be that people who could connect software to the physical world were scarce and expensive. Biology, chemistry, and robotics have been limited less by ideas than by engineering capacity. A protein simulation is code. A robot learning to grasp is code. Once writing that code is close to free, the rate of experimentation in the physical sciences will rival the rate of experimentation in software.
AI writing our code doesn’t remove the demand for human work. It shifts it. Someone still has to decide what’s worth building, define evals, and verify that what shipped is what was intended. Someone has to govern the data agents learn from. Someone has to impose taste. I think there will be more of this work than ever, because we’ll be directing and managing it across dimensions and systems that didn’t exist a few years ago.
Designing the user experience, the system, and judgment calls are what the best engineers already spend their time on. In the coming decade, we’ll see even more people putting these tools to use. We just might not call them engineers, and we certainly won’t be the only ones typing.
