AI is undoubtedly threatening programming jobs, but the very best programmers might end up benefiting from all the disruption.
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt believes that while AI could impact the majority of programmers, those at the very top of the field have a different future ahead of them — a more valuable one. In a recent discussion, Schmidt argued that the elite tier of programmers possesses qualities that AI amplifies rather than replaces, and that the industry restructuring AI triggers will actually work in their favour.
“The most likely scenario is that it’s always been true that the very top programmers were worth ten times more than the ones right below,” Schmidt said. “There’s something special about the mathematical reasoning skills of programmers. Those people will become more valuable, not less valuable, because these systems need to be controlled by humans at the moment.”
Schmidt went further, arguing that the best programmers will be uniquely equipped to take advantage of AI’s parallelization capabilities — the ability to run many processes simultaneously. “Those people will be capable of grasping the parallelization and the activities of this,” he said.
He also sees a structural shift coming in how the industry is organised: “It also means that you’re going to have a relatively small number of very large companies and a very large number of very small companies, because you don’t need as many people.”
Schmidt illustrated this with an example from a startup he’s involved with: “I was talking to the programmer, and he says, ‘Here’s what I do.’ And he’s working on UIs of various kinds. He said, ‘I write the spec of what I want, and then I write a test function, an evaluation function, and then I turn it on.’ I said, ‘What time?’ He goes, ‘Seven o’clock in the evening.’ ‘When does it finish?’ ‘Four in the morning.’ And then he gets up, has breakfast, and sees what’s been invented. I mean, it’s mind-boggling.”
Schmidt’s observation about market consolidation is already playing out. The massive AI infrastructure investments being made by a handful of hyperscalers are creating barriers that only the largest companies can clear. Meanwhile, a quarter of Y Combinator startups already have more than 95% of their code generated by AI — almost entirely led by highly technical founders doing more with far fewer people. This fits the Schmidt model precisely: a small, elite team amplified by AI outcompetes a large conventional engineering department.
The squeeze on mid-tier programmers, meanwhile, is real and accelerating. Schmidt himself has separately predicted that AI will replace the vast majority of programmers within a year. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei put the timeline for AI writing 90% of code at three to six months. Klarna and Salesforce have already paused hiring engineers citing AI-driven productivity gains.
The portrait Schmidt paints is stark but not entirely bleak: the programming labour market will bifurcate sharply, with elite talent becoming rarer and more valuable, and the middle hollowing out. For the programmer who can direct AI agents through the night and wake up to evaluate what they built — that future has already arrived.