Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt to programmers: Stop building the house. Start designing it.
The former Google CEO said today's AI coding tools surpass his skills and free up programmers to be the architects, not the ones who build the house.
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has warned programmers to stop building software and instead focus on designing it. He explained that AI coding tools have now written code that even he could not produce at his peak as a programmer in his 20s. Schmidt, now 71, told the Blackstone's "Inside Blackstone" podcast that he was one of the best programmers of his generation, but now AI tools can outperform him.
Schmidt advised young people to learn programming as they will act as architects, directing AI to execute their designs. He likened his past role as building the house to the AI tools' current capability of designing it. The next generation of programmers will be very smart and will need to provide precise instructions to AI tools to achieve their desired outcomes.
This shift is already evident within AI companies. At Daytona, a 30-person AI startup, CEO Ivan Burazin mentioned that each of the 16 engineers manages an average of five AI agents and no longer writes any code. Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao also stated on the "Invest Like the Best" podcast that AI handles much of the execution layer of knowledge work, freeing up humans for oversight and strategy. She added that over 90% of their code is now generated by Claude Code.
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