The era of software engineers writing code line by line is officially over, according to former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Speaking at a recent industry conference, the tech veteran revealed that a massive shift hit the software industry late last year, completely altering how computer engineers work. Schmidt confessed that he is personally “in mourning” over the change, watching the traditional programming career he started at age 13 or 14 vanish in a single lifetime.According to Schmidt, state-of-the-art programmers are no longer typing out code manually. Instead, they are now acting as supervisors to teams of “AI friends.”“I’ll just confess what’s really going on in my mind? I’m in mourning. And I’ve been mourning because I started as a programmer when I was basically 13 or 14, and that is essentially over. Right, how in how can your entire identity and life’s career as a programmer? Computer scientist be over in one lifetime. It’s supposed to be like your children or your grandchildren,” he said in a video posted online.
‘Modern programmer’s working has changed’
Schmidt painted a vivid picture of how top-tier software engineering is done today, describing a routine that relies entirely on automation and AI agents. He said that instead of staring at a blank text editor, a modern programmer’s day starts with 10 AI agents, who are given a specific task.Hr continued that before heading out to lunch, the programmer assigns the AI long enough tasks to ensure the digital assistants keep working through the hour.“And what’s happened. I’ll give you an example. So, the way programming is done at the state of the art now is the programmer wakes up goes to the office? Because they’re social, and they sit there, but they don’t have that many friends. So they sit in their office, and they collect 10 Claude friends or 10 Gemini friends. And they set them up with objective functions, and they watch what they wrote the code that they write,” he told the gathering.“Then they go out to lunch, and they make sure that they have long enough tasks that they continue working while they’re having lunch. So, then go back to the office, and they do this, and then it’s time to go home to see the family and so forth, and they set up an objective function of this is what I want you to do,” he explained.Schmidt noted that this massive transformation began rapidly around October of last year. He issued a stark warning to tech leaders and developers alike, stating that anyone still building software the old-fashioned way is wasting time.“If you’re writing code in any traditional way: stop. It’s over,” Schmidt urged. He challenged business leaders to audit their tech teams immediately: “If you manage a company and you have software engineers, say, ‘Why are you still writing code the way you did it six months ago?’”
