Amjad Masad, CEO of Replit, said that learning to code is pointless as AI will take over coding jobs in the near future. This comes after Google CEO Sundar Pichai revealed that 25 per cent of the new code at the tech giant is AI generated, though it is later reviewed by engineers.

ChatGPT maker OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also said that AI has already taken over half of the coding work in many companies. The company’s Chief Product Officer, Kevin Weil, added that AI may soon outperform humans in coding. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted that within six months, AI could generate up to 90 per cent of all code.

As AI has upped its coding game, and CEO’s of big tech companies think that human jobs in this sector will be replaced by AI, Masad said that learning computer programming is a waste of time. It is to be noted that his own company Replit lets users build apps and websites using AI.

‘Don’t study coding now’

“I no longer think you should learn to code,” Amjad Masad wrote on Twitter (now X).

He agreed with Dario Amodei of Anthropic, who had predicted that almost all of the codes in the coming future will be AI generated.

“In the upcae, like what Dario just said recently, all code will be AI generated. I assume that on this optimisation path we’re on, where agents are gonna get better and better and better, the answer would be different.

The answer would be no. It would be a waste of time to learn how to code. But you could have different predictions, and I think different people will make different assumptions,” Replit CEO Amjad Masad said.

He added that coding may become obsolete, but people will still need to continue to work on their fundamentals: “I’m at this point, like agents pilled. I’m very bullish. Like, I sort of changed my answer even like a year ago. I would say kind of learn a bit of coding. I would say learn how to think, learn how to break down problems, right? Learn how to communicate clearly, with as you would with humans, but also with machines.”

After his statement went viral, Masad posted a follow-up, calling it a “bittersweet realisation”. He reflected on how he spent years popularising coding through open-source work, Codecademy, and Replit, only to now believe that AI is making traditional coding skills redundant.

“I understand all the cope. It was hard to arrive at this conclusion. There are obvious domain exceptions, but the trend is hard to miss,” he added.

Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu has also predicted that AI will replace more than 90 per cent of the repetitive programming tasks. “When people say ‘AI will write 90% of the code,’ I readily agree because 90% of what programmers write is ‘boiler plate,’” he wrote on X (formerly Twitter).

Not everyone, however, agrees with the notion that AI will completely replace human programmers. Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, dismissed such claims, stating, “AI is 90% marketing and just 10% reality.”

What did social media users say?

“At least for me, learning to code is what’s allowing me to learn what you suggest. I know it’s for soundbites, but I think the real lesson is don’t get caught up in syntax,” said one social media user.

Another said, “Strongly agree with this… this doesn’t mean engineering is obsolete. The engineering approach to solving problems is now even more crucial to make the best use of AI tools. the paradigm of what the focus of engineering just changes from syntax and semantics to problem solving.”

Mossad replied to this with a simple, “Bingo!”

“Learning how to think has always been important. AI or not. Sadly, people outsource thinking to the algorithms…,” expressed a third.

A fourth commented, “‘Don’t learn to code’ is wild advice coming from the CEO of a coding platform. That’s like a gym owner saying, ‘Don’t work out, just learn how muscles work.’ Coding is thinking. If you can’t debug a function, good luck debugging life.”