OpenAI president Greg Brockman said that AI tools are now responsible for a much bigger chunk of software code than they were just months ago, sparking fresh debate about whether human engineers are increasingly becoming overseers rather than the main coders. Speaking at a Sequoia Capital event, he described how quickly the shift has unfolded. In his view, AI‑driven coding systems were behind roughly 20% of the code base around December, but that share has since jumped sharply, with machines now handling a far larger portion of the actual coding work than people realise.
“If you look even over the course of December, we went from these agentic coding tools writing 20% of your code to writing 80% of your code,” Brockman said. “Which means they go from being kind of a sideshow to being the main thing that you’re doing.”
Brockman helped launch OpenAI in 2015:
Brockman, who helped launch OpenAI in 2015, urged startups and founders to actively embrace the technology, stressing that progress is moving at a fast pace. He highlighted Codex, OpenAI’s coding platform, explaining that it has grown from a tool built mostly for software engineers into something that can assist nearly anyone who works on a computer.
Even so, Brockman was clear that human oversight still matters. He noted that at OpenAI, there is always a person held accountable for every line of code that is ultimately signed off and merged into active projects.
“That thoughtfulness of not just saying ‘oh just blindly use’ this or ‘we don’t want to use this at all.’ I think neither extreme is quite right,” he said about AI-generated code.
OpenAI isn’t the only company seeing this kind of shift:
OpenAI isn’t the only company seeing this kind of shift. Google CEO Sundar Pichai has said that around 75% of the new code being written inside Google is now generated by AI and then checked over by human engineers.
In March, Business Insider reported that Meta expected 65% of engineers in its creation team—which handles the core creative experiences—to use AI for more than three‑quarters of the code they actually commit. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has also shared his own forecasts on just how much of future software code AI tools are likely to produce.
“I think we will be there in three to six months, where AI is writing 90% of the code. And then, in 12 months, we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code,” Amodei said at a conference last year.