More and more tech leaders are saying that coding is set to be dramatically different in the AI era.
Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, recently shared his perspective on the future of coding, suggesting a paradigm shift towards natural language programming. His vision paints a picture where coding becomes accessible to a much broader audience, including creatives and designers, unlocking unprecedented levels of innovation.
“I think we are entering a new era of coding which is going to be very interesting. I think we’re going to move into a world where – sometimes it’s called ‘vibe coding’ – where you’re basically coding with natural language,” Hassabis said.
“We’ve seen this before with computers. I remember when I first started programming in the 80s, we were doing assembler. Of course, that seems crazy now. Why would you do machine code? You just, you know, you start with C and then you get Python, and so on.”
“Really, one could see this as the natural evolution of going higher and higher up the abstraction stack of programming languages, leaving more of the lower-level implementation details to the compiler.”
“Now one could just view this as the natural sort of final step: we just use natural language. Then everything is a high-level program, a super high-level programming language.”
“I think eventually that’s what we may get to. The exciting thing there is that, of course, it makes coding accessible to a whole new range of people – creatives who normally would not have been able to implement their ideas without the help of teams of programmers – designers, game designers, writers. So that’s going to be pretty exciting, I think, from the creativity point of view,” Hassabis said.
Hassabis isn’t the only tech leader who’s said that programming will soon look very different. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said that the world’s best coder will be an AI by the end of the year. Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott has said that 95% of code will be written by AI in the next five years, and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei feels that we’ll get there much sooner. All this means that humans will likely simply give instructions in English of what they want to accomplish, while the actual coding will be done by computers.
This could democratize coding to previously unthinkable levels. The learning curve of being able to program could become substantially smaller, opening up coding to all kinds of non-technical people. This could negatively impact some coders, but others, who can create products and market them, could find themselves being several times more effective than they were previously. It’s a time of great change in coding, and coders and non-coders would do well to keep an eye on the rapidly changing landscape.