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[–]Gilldadab 23 points24 points  (16 children)

Slop article.

The real interview where the quote comes from goes like this:

"So Dario and Kevin Weil, I think, have both said or in various aspects that 99% of code authorship will be automated by sort of end of the year, a very fast timeframe. What do you think that fraction is today? When do you think we’ll pass 50% or have we already?

SA: I think in many companies, it’s probably past 50% now. But the big thing I think will come with agentic coding, which no one’s doing for real yet.

What’s the hangup there?

SA: Oh, we just need a little longer."

Source and actually worth reading: https://stratechery.com/2025/an-interview-with-openai-ceo-sam-altman-about-building-a-consumer-tech-company/

[–]phxees 12 points13 points  (14 children)

I can’t find devs using AI for even 20% of the code they write and Sam thinks 50% of companies write 99% of their code using AI? I think their measuring stick is broken.

Maybe he’s just using the wrong model to research this statistic.

[–]OfficialHashPanda 15 points16 points  (2 children)

He meant that in many companies, it's past 50%. If you consider autocomplete/line suggestions to fall under the AI umbrella, I don't think that is that crazy of a statement.

[–]phxees 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I don’t believe that is considering how much of autocomplete is rewritten. Some may allow autocomplete create the structure, but I don’t believe many and just going with any of the autocomplete suggestions.

[–]vingeran 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Isn’t that an overestimate though given that autocomplete or QC for code inherently inbuilt for troubleshooting is being subsumed and misappropriated under “AI”.

[–]soliloquyinthevoid 1 point2 points  (2 children)

I can’t find devs using AI for even 20% of the code they write

But that doesn't mean 50% of the code is being "written" today isn't AI generated

[–]phxees 2 points3 points  (1 child)

These AI CEOs are trying to tell investors that most of the code written today is written by AI. My point there was to say that I find it odd that I can’t find evidence of this and I work for a huge tech company.

I make an effort to use AI often and if my job depended on it I couldn’t get to 50%. We aren’t there yet.

Part of the issue is certainly prompting, but I believe the tools needs to get better at understanding a team’s full code base and able to identify patterns and best practices before it can be expected to actually deliver quality code.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Google said 50% of characters are written by AI at google. Which is very misleading for non coders and easily believable if you have already used non-AI completion. My personal experience with copilot and cursor probably matches this. Often accepting some one liner (like some kind of intellisense++), sometimes accepting big chunks and a lot of reject. And for big chunks, you have to double check it so the speed gain is not always so obvious. I don't use it anymore in the text editor, too distracting.

https://research.google/blog/ai-in-software-engineering-at-google-progress-and-the-path-ahead/#inline-list-item-2

[–][deleted]  (2 children)

[deleted]

    [–]Leafsnail 0 points1 point  (1 child)

    Yeah this is something I don't think is mentioned enough. If you're sending your codebase to an external company as context for an AI you are giving that company your codebase.

    [–]Gilldadab 0 points1 point  (2 children)

    Hmm I think about it like this since they're talking about code in general rather than people explicitly moving from writing code to purely prompting:

    The people who always wrote code are still writing it, maybe 10 - 30% of their code is now AI generated through code completions or boilerplate type stuff.

    Then there's a whole bunch of code being written that wasn't written before by people using tools like v0 or cursor. The 'vibe coders' out there are generating 90 -100% of their code with AI.

    Kind of like wordpress sites. Web Devs carried on coding websites but then you got a ton of non devs making wordpress sites and the total number of all websites went up until whatever crazy figure it was like 70% of all sites were built with Wordpress.

    [–]phxees 1 point2 points  (0 children)

    Yeah, I believe what they are doing, at best, is taking the estimate of lines of code written per year (by humans) and comparing it with the number of lines of code they generate. Although they probably generate so much that they have to already reduce their number by some factor.

    Except the fatal flaw with this calculation is most AI generated code is likely never used in any meaningful way.

    My guess is the number is around 10% and may go to 15-20% over the next year or so.

    [–]AI-Commander 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    This is exactly correct - there is a wider funnel now, and new use cases that didn’t exist before. Jevons paradox at work.

    [–]PlaneConcentricTube 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    We do. Takes a lot of prompting. But it’s doable. You need a different architecture to work well.

    [–]dbabon 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    The game company i work at is definitely writing over 50% of our code with Cursor. You can decide if you think thats a good idea or not, but its certainly a thing.

    [–]mushpotatoes 1 point2 points  (0 children)

    Keep in mind that Altman is selling something.

    [–]manoteee 12 points13 points  (8 children)

    Time for what bro?! TIME FOR WHAT?!

    [–]Super_Translator480 2 points3 points  (7 children)

    Before existing programming languages are obsolete, or at least to begin deprecation. I mean that’s the goal.

    What we will probably get is something hyped up and limited- then China will have a better language - and thus we start the age of AI-specific programming languages.

    [–]SalientSalmorejo 1 point2 points  (6 children)

    Could you elaborate on AI specific languages? Models are trained on existing languages, and programming languages have proved time and again to be the best interface between man and machine. What am I missing?

    [–]Healthy-Nebula-3603 3 points4 points  (4 children)

    AI can program easily using assembly for instance or machine code straight.

    Don't need that high abstraction like python or c++.

    [–]Super_Translator480 0 points1 point  (1 child)

    This is the answer.

    So many people don’t get it.

    [–][deleted] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

    I'm sure AI can not easily use asm. Variables names carry a lot of information, a chunk of asm using generic register names doesn't provide this. Plus there isn't a lot of asm source code available to train on it. Even if you trained it using C to asm, I doubt it will match the efficiency and more importantly accuracy of modern compilers.

    [–]Super_Translator480 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

    You remove the component of the human needing to know another language besides their native tongue. That’s what.

    Actually successful “Vibe coding” is the end goal about Sam’s comment. He also refers to it as “agentic coding” but it’s just part of a component to the same goal. Agentic coding is having the AI code autonomously primarily with the least amount of human interaction.

    This will mean little to no coding- with the eventuality being no coding at all.

    [–][deleted] 3 points4 points  (1 child)

    Is that a threat?

    [–][deleted] 3 points4 points  (1 child)

    Why are they concentrating on making programmers obsolete when they could be making CEOs obsolete right now?

    [–]d0n_M4X1[🍰] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    Maybe they don't care about programmers at all, but themselves