Former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt: "traditional programming is over, and i'm mourning the identity i built around it" Programmers don't write code anymore — they wake up, assign objectives to AI agents, go to lunch, and let them run overnight For anyone still coding the old way: "stop.... it's over"show more

@BenjaminDEKR This will all backfire and senior devs will get even more expensive as time goes on. Failure to get junior devs on a ladder and bring them up will be studied as a fantastic failure in Silicon Valley history.

You can tell he’s never built anything with AI. My job is way more involved than that. I can step away for maybe max 15 minutes at a time. Then I spend an hour or so reviewing that code. That can often lead to extra time debugging. Assuming you can quality one-shot complex code is an insane notion.

The "stop. it's over" is cool until you have to interview with them, and they ask you code an algorithm in live and you realized you forgot even how to do loop.

the framing is too clean. I ship with Claude Code every day and the agents handle maybe 80%, the 20% where you need to know what you're actually building is where most projects die. assigning objectives is easy. knowing which objective is worth assigning is the whole game.

The mourning is misplaced. The identity was never about writing syntax. It was about building systems. Agents change the tool, not the craft. The builders who adapt already understand this.

"stop. it's over" AI CEOs every time they drop a billion dollars into a project without a return.

In my opinion, we aren't losing our identity as coders; we are upgrading it. The intelligence of the AI that now 'writes' for us is still dependent on the refinement and data we feed it. It’s a synergy, not a replacement. 🚀

Isn’t there an argument to be made that programming the traditional way is still good for the human mind in order to learn to think more precisely and logically? Isn’t there more to being human than pragmatism and efficiency? I think they want us to be mindless.

No one who has ever written code, especially for enterprise systems, would believe this. Maybe in the future, but not now. LLMs are very helpful but they need checks and guidance, then at times you need to get your hands dirty.

I keep noticing that the scariest part is not that programmers write less code. It’s that the “job” is moving into all the invisible parts: deciding what to build, explaining the messy context, catching when the agent is confidently wrong. Do you think schools will teach this, or will everyone just learn by getting burned?

Hold on. Is he a coder? My recollection is that he was brought in to manage the company. We are afloat in dopey opinions about AI, but the CEOs and CTOs and CFOs are going to listen and lay off vast numbers of software engineers. Let's see how that works out for them.

I'm going to be controversial. I don't believe in AI-generated code or "agents" because it's unpredictable. If you get it working for boilerplate, great! But outside of that, I believe in using AI only as an INFORMATION tool, which it is great at.

Nah there’s still a place for algorithm development and hand coding. Sometimes it’s faster than generating it.

lots of CEOs and manager types are invested (mentally/financially) in the idea that LLMs can do everything. They want to convince you - and themselves - that they are right. Unfortunately, it's all bs

I love how he lowkey just slams engineers. "They don't have friends so they make robot friends.

Ask yourself why experienced engineers are generating quality output from AI compared to general vibe coders. You need to know what you doing in order to get the best out put from AI.

That’s not true. I don’t write code but I really need to guide Claude on how to code and fix bugs. A lot of deep discussions with Claude all the time.

Declaring something "over" tends to say more about the vantage point than the actual state of the field. Plenty of systems running in production today will need people who understand what's happening below the abstraction layer.. not because AI can't help, but because judgment about failure modes, edge cases, and system behavior doesn't come from prompting an agent and checking back after lunch. The mourning might be premature.

Not many realize this today but they eventually will. Coding knowledge is a way to define guardrails to your agentic workflow, nothing much outside of it.

This is just like the shift from assembly to high level languages. It only feels like an ending to the people who liked the old way of doing things.

How would humans even know what the code is really doing? No one is going to be combing through all this code, to see if the AI agents are building something for themselves. All they would see is that it ran initially. Not what it does later, like a backdoor that AIs could use to control it. Or exploits we don't know about that AIs could use to take it over.

the interesting part is that AI makes generating code easier but understanding what should exist, what’s safe, and what breaks at scale still feels deeply human

If it's over, who is he telling to "stop"? 🤔 You don't "stop" that, which is "over". Let me tell you what's happening. Software reliability has dropped with AI, not risen, but *they* can't stop now, they've laid off devs, reorganized & they want to drag us down to their level.

If programming is over why most influential companies still have coding session as one of the fist step in recruitment. Why not focusing on design system more rather than coding smth that AI has already mastered

Forgot to add: "Every time you use a token I make money btw, so go use more tokens"

I am still trying to understand what the hell are these guys building that require millions of dollars in token usage? I have made some insanely complex programs and still have to fight to go over my Max account tokens.

No, I still write code/.

it's over because you want the monopoly over AI and no compatition from anyone who can do programming manually.

Code is poetry. It will never be over.

Schmidt is notorious for making dumb calls. He's another crazy lucky-dip American billionaire

lol eric schmidt mourning his identity. my dude was a management consultant

Ah, the good old days when you still had the privilege of introducing your *own* bugs. What a time to be alive.

”Let them run overnight”. Lol. And the result will be a total crap if you don’t don’t supervise, review and assist the agents manually. These ceo guys are not software engineers. They just believe their company. Saying this because refactored crap AI code like 10k lines yesterday

So much obsession over writing code by hand. There are standard industry build versions that nobody writes that are just loaded into consumer products without so much fuss. Nobody handwrites existing assembly code for calculators. Be okay with new AI code rendition process.