OpenAI’s president says AI coding tools have advanced rapidly in recent months.
In a Sequoia Capital talk uploaded Thursday, Greg Brockman said AI has become more than just a support tool for software engineers.
“Throughout December, we went from writing 20% of our code to writing 80% of our code with these agent coding tools,” Brockman said. “So it goes from being like a sideshow to being the main thing that you do.”
Brockman, who co-founded an AI company in 2015, said he advises founders to “lean in” and embrace AI tools because they are advancing rapidly.
For example, OpenAI’s code generation platform Codex has recently evolved from a tool primarily for software engineers to one that can support “anyone who works with computers,” he said.
Still, Brockman said OpenAI ensures humans are responsible for all code that is merged.
“That thoughtfulness, rather than just saying, ‘I’m just going to use this blindly,’ or ‘I don’t want to use this at all.’ I don’t think either extreme is entirely correct,” he said of the AI-generated code.
AI’s role in code creation is rapidly expanding
Brockman is part of a group of technology leaders touting AI’s ability to generate much of a company’s code.
Last month, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that 75% of new code created within the company is now generated by AI and reviewed by human engineers.
This number has risen rapidly in recent years, from 25% in 2024 to 50% last year.
Meta is also making progress in this area.
Business Insider reported in March that Meta expects 65% of engineers in production organizations responsible for building and maintaining core creative experiences to use AI to create at least 75% of the code they commit.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei also predicts the amount of code that AI will generate.
“I think within three to six months we’ll get to a world where AI writes 90% of the code. And in 12 months, we might get to a world where AI basically writes all the code,” Amodei said at a conference last year.
“With AI now writing much of the code at Anthropic, the rate of progress in building next-generation AI systems is already significantly accelerating,” Amodei wrote in a blog post earlier this year.