More and more CEOs are talking about how they’re back to coding — and AI is doing all of it for them.
Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman, a lifelong programmer who has been writing code since childhood, says he hasn’t touched a line of code himself since December 2024 — and that the shift happened almost overnight, driven by new AI models that changed how he works entirely.
“I’m a programmer — it’s my first love. I’ve done it almost every day since I was a little kid,” Huffman said. “Something happened in December. The new models came out, and I haven’t read, let alone written, a line of code since December. But I’ve produced so much more.”
The change wasn’t just in output volume. It was in the tools themselves. Where developers once had an editor like Cursor with code on one side and AI on the other, Huffman says that setup already feels dated. “I don’t even have an editor anymore — it’s just AI.”
He was candid about the pace of change making any attachment to specific tools impractical: “I don’t know what the tools are going to be in a month. It’s really evolving so fast. You can’t get married to any particular tool or way of working right now.”
The bottleneck, he says, has now shifted to an unexpected place. “Our bottleneck at Reddit right now is actually code review — because we can produce so much code, but we’ve got to review it and deploy it. So we’re still working through that.”
The observation is telling. Huffman’s experience captures a broader inflection point: AI has removed the constraint on code generation, but human judgment is still required downstream — at least for now. His earlier framing — “suffice to say, it’s changing really rapidly” — might be an understatement.
Huffman is not alone. Jensen Huang has said that “nothing would give me more joy” than having his engineers stop writing code entirely and focus purely on solving problems. Satya Nadella put the figure at 20–30% of Microsoft’s codebase now being written by AI; Sundar Pichai said the same of Google. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei went further, predicting that AI could handle 90% of coding within months. The term “vibe coding” — coined by Andrej Karpathy just over a year ago — has gone from a weekend-project curiosity to standard practice at some of the world’s most technically sophisticated companies.
What Huffman adds to this conversation is something more personal: a CEO who genuinely loved to code, who did it every day, and who no longer does — not because he stopped caring, but because the AI has simply become better at it than the workflow demands. The code review bottleneck he describes may be the last meaningful human checkpoint in that pipeline. How long it stays that way is anyone’s guess.