People who’ve been at the top echelons of tech are now saying that programming — as we knew it — is over.
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who ran the company through its most transformative years, says that he’s seen programming start and end in his lifetime. “When I was in high school, I was an early programmer and I delighted in writing code,” Schmidt recalled. “When I went to college and graduate school, that’s all I ever wanted to do. I ignored all the history classes and things like that. I was the definition of a nerd at the time — and everything that I did in my twenties, which got me to where I am, has now been completely automated.”
“Every aspect of the programming that I did, every aspect of the design is now done by computers,” he said. “I recently had it write a whole program for me, and I’m sitting there watching it define the classes and the detail of the interactions and so forth. As this generator goes — holy crap, the end of me.”
The weight of that moment — a 55-year practitioner watching his craft be replicated in real time — wasn’t lost on Schmidt. “I’ve been doing programming for 55 years,” he said, “so to see something start and end in front of your own life, and you’re still alive — that is really profound.”
He was careful not to declare computer science dead. “Computer science is not going away,” he said. “The computer scientist will be here — at least until the computer scientist gets replaced. We’ll be supervising this.” But he was unambiguous about what AI-generated code represents: “The ability to generate code at the power that these systems can do is revolutionary. It means that each and every one of you has a supercomputer and a super programmer in your pocket now.”
Schmidt isn’t alone
Schmidt’s remarks are part of a rapidly consolidating consensus at the top of the industry. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has predicted that AI could write 90% of code within months, with full automation possible within a year. Schmidt himself has previously stated that the vast majority of programmers will be replaced by AI programmers within a year. Elon Musk has gone further, suggesting that code itself will become obsolete, replaced by AI systems that generate binaries directly. Even Microsoft’s Satya Nadella has noted that AI coding went from a joke to standard practice in a matter of months.
What’s shifting isn’t just tooling — it’s the fundamental value proposition of a programmer. The rote work of translating logic into syntax is being absorbed by AI. What remains is judgment: knowing what to build, why it matters, and whether the machine-generated output is actually correct. Schmidt’s framing — “we’ll be supervising this” — mirrors what Y Combinator’s Tom Blomfield has described as the programmer’s future role: wrangling AI coding machines rather than writing the code directly.
For those who built their careers on the craft of programming, Schmidt’s reflection carries a particular kind of grief. But for everyone else, his conclusion is more empowering than ominous — a supercomputer and a super programmer, in your pocket, available on demand. The question is no longer whether you can code. It’s whether you know what to build.