Most and more tech leaders seem to be saying that coding might not remain the preserve of humans for much longer.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently shared some predictions about the future of coding at his company, suggesting a dramatic shift towards AI-generated code within the next year and a half. His comments hint at a future where AI not only assists developers, but actually takes the lead in writing code for complex projects, especially in the realm of AI research. He specifically pointed to Meta’s internal development of coding AI agents to advance their Llama large language model research, claiming the majority of the code powering these efforts will soon be written by AI.
“We’re working on a number of coding agents inside Meta,” Zuckerberg stated, “because we’re not really an enterprise software company. We’re primarily building it for ourselves. So, again, we go for the specific goal. We’re not trying to build a general developer tool. We’re trying to build a coding agent, an AI research agent, that basically advances Llama research specifically. And it’s just fully kind of plugged into our tool chain and all this.” He emphasized the strategic importance of this internal focus, tailoring the AI coding agents to Meta’s specific research needs.
He continued, “So I think that that’s important, and I think is going to end up being an important part of how the stuff gets done. I would guess that sometime in the next 12 to 18 months we’ll reach the point where most of the code that’s going towards these efforts is written by AI.” Zuckerberg further clarified his vision, distinguishing it from existing autocomplete tools: “And I don’t mean like autocomplete. I mean right today you have, you have kind of, you know, good autocomplete, like you start writing something and it can complete the section of code.”
Instead, he envisions a much more powerful AI coding agent: “I’m talking more like you give it a goal; it can run tests; it can kind of improve things; it can find issues if it’s higher quality code than the average very good person on the team already.”
Meta isn’t the only company that’s seeing large amounts of AI use to write code. Google CEO Sundar Pichai had said last week that “well over 30 percent” of code at Google is now being written by AI, and Microsoft too has come up with a similar number. Some other companies, like Salesforce and Klarna, have said they’ve paused hiring humans altogether given the gains from AI in coding.
Zuckerberg, though, has talked specifically about the coding for AI agents and research into Llama being automated to a great degree. This could be a viable path to superintelligence — if AI research can be automated by AI, it can be sped up a lot more than if it were being done by humans. Unlike humans, AI agents can be created in arbitrarily large numbers, and they don’t need to rest or pause while working. As such, if Meta believes that most of the code towards its AI research and AI agents will be written by AI, it is yet another sign that humanity could be poised to create dramatic scientific and technical breakthroughs in the not-too-distant future.