OpenAI may be competing to build the best AI coding agent, but its chairman is still content to do things the old-fashioned way.
“I’m trying to get to a world where I don’t write code,” Brett Taylor told Stripe co-founder John Collison on a recent episode of Collison’s podcast Cheeky Pint. “It’s hard emotionally, even if it makes sense. It’s hard for me not to care.”
Taylor’s struggle mirrors others in the AI and technology industry whose careers are being undermined by advances in agentic AI. Boris Cherny, creator of Claude Code, recently said that Anthropic’s rival coding tools have “virtually solved” coding.
Taylor said he cares about the “accuracy” and “robustness” of his code, but he tries to teach himself to put less weight on his emotions.
“I feel like if I cared too much about that artifact that was once my center, it would prevent me from becoming a self-fulfilled software engineer in the future, so I forced myself not to care about it,” he said.
Now that most coding is automated, some software engineers are starting to question what their job is. Some say that hand-coding can become an artisanal skill, similar to harness making in a car-dominated world.
“It’s probably the same luxury that modern harness makers enjoy, ‘Oh, the text is just right, the stitching is just right,'” Ruby on Rails developer David Heinemeier Hansson said in January. “It’s like, ‘Okay, but you’re no longer part of the main transportation production.’ And I’m like, ‘So what?'” I will continue to make hand-drawn cord saddles as much as I can for fun. ”
Taylor said he wouldn’t mind chatting with OpenAI’s Codex, but is still unsure of what future tools will bring.
“And as you can imagine, I think any test you’re interested in has a demo or a mockup shown,” he said. “What will the integrated development environment of the future, for lack of a better word, look like?”
Taylor joked about creating “custom craftsman code” but said coding “has been my whole life.” He is still thinking about what the age of AI will bring.
“I was proud of the elegance of the code I wrote,” he said. “But if I’m still interested in craftsmanship, what do I want? I can’t quite picture it yet.”
