Name: How useful is AI for programming? | Marc Andreessen and Lex Fridman
Uploaded: 2025-01-31T21:44:44.000Z
Duration: 12 min 42 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I think your profile on X states it's time to build, it feels like 2025 is a good year to build.

So I wanted to ask your advice and maybe for advice for anybody who's trying to build, who's trying to build something useful in the world, maybe launch a startup or maybe just launch apps, services, whatever, ship software products.

So maybe by way of advice, how do you actually get to shipping?

So I mean a big part of the answer I think is we're in the middle of a legit revolution and I know you've been talking about this on your show, but like AI coding, I mean this is the biggest earthquake to hit software in certainly my life, maybe since the invention of software.

And I'm sure we're involved in various of these companies, but these tools from a variety of companies are absolutely revolutionary and they're getting better by leaps and bounds right every day.

And you know all this, but like the thing with coding, there's like open questions of whether AI can get better at, I don't know, understanding philosophy or whatever, creative writing or whatever, but like for sure we can make it much better at coding, right?

Because you can validate the results of coding.

And so there's all these methods of synthetic data and self-training and reinforcement learning that for sure you can do with coding.

And so everybody I know who works in the field says AI coding is going to get to be phenomenally good and it's already great.

And you can, I mean, anybody who wants to see this, just go on YouTube and look at AI coding demos, little kids making apps in 10 minutes working with an AI coding system.

I mean, I think this is an area where it's clearly the golden age.

You know, in a day, as a coder for sure in a day, you can retrain yourself, you know, start using these things, get a huge boost in productivity.

As a non-coder, you can learn much more quickly than you could before.

That's actually a tricky one in terms of learning as a non-coder to build stuff.

It's still, I feel like you still need to learn how to code.

Like you could legitimately be a one person company and get quite far.

So I think for sure for quite a long time, the people who are good at coding are going to be the best at actually having AIs code things because they're going to understand what, I mean, very basic, they're going to understand what's happening, right?

And they're going to be able to evaluate the work and they're going to be able to, you know, literally like manage AIs better.

Even if they're not literally handwriting the code, they're just going to have a much better sense of what's going on.

So I definitely think like 100%, my nine-year-old is like doing all kinds of coding classes and he'll keep doing that for certainly through 18.

But look, having said that, one of the things you can do with an AI is say, teach me how to code, right?

And so, and, you know, there's a whole bunch of, you know, I'll name names, like there's a whole bunch of work that they're doing at Khan Academy for free.

And then, you know, we have this company, Replit, which was originally specifically built for kids for coding that has AI built in.

That's just absolutely extraordinary now.

And then, you know, there's a variety of other systems like this.

And yeah, I mean, the AI is going to be able to teach you to code.

AI, by the way, is, as you know, spectacularly good at explaining code, right?

And so, you know, the tools have these features now where you can talk to the code base.

And so you can like literally like ask the code base questions about itself.

And you can also just do the simple form, which is you can copy and paste code into ChatGPT and just ask it to explain it, what's going on, rewrite it, improve it, make recommendations.

And so there's, yeah, there's dozens of ways to do this.

By the way, you can also, I mean, even more broadly than code, like, OK, you want to make a video game, OK, now you can do AI art generation, sound generation, dialogue generation, voice generation, right?

And so all of a sudden, like you don't need designers, you know, you don't need, you know, voice actors, you know.

So, yeah, so there's just like unlimited.

And then, you know, a big part of coding is so-called glue.

You know, it's interfacing into other systems.

So it's interfacing into, you know, Stripe to take payments or something like that.

And, you know, AI is fantastic at writing glue code.

So, you know, really, really good at making sure that you can plug everything together, really good at helping you figure out how to deploy.

You know, it'll even write a business plan for you.

So it's just this, it's like everything happening with AI right now.

It's just, it's like this latent superpower.

And there's this incredible spectrum of people who have really figured out massive performance increases, productivity increases with it already.

There's other people who aren't even aware it's happening.

And there's some gearing to whether you're a coder or not, but I think there are lots of non-coders that are off the races.

And I think there are lots of professional coders who are still like, you know, the blacksmiths were not necessarily in favor of, you know, the car business.

So, you know, there's the old William Gibson quote, the future is here.

And this is maybe the most potent version of that that I've ever seen.

Yeah, there's, you know, the old meme with the bell curve, the people on both extremes say AI coding is the future.

It's very common for programmers to say, you know, if you're any good of a programmer, you're not going to be using it.

I consider myself a reasonably good programmer and my productivity has been just skyrocketed and the joy of programming skyrocketed.

Every aspect of programming is more efficient, more productive, more fun, all that kind of  I would also say code is, you know, code has of anything in like industrial society, code has the highest elasticity, which is to say the easier it is to make it the more of it gets made.

Like I think effectively there's unlimited demand for code.

Like in other words, like there's always some other idea for a thing that you can do, a feature that you can add or a thing that you can optimize.

And so, like overwhelmingly, you know, the amount of code that exists in the world is a fraction of even the ideas we have today.

And then we come up with new ideas all the time.

And so, I think that like, you know, I was in the late 80s, early 90s when sort of automated coding systems started to come out, the expert systems, big deal in those days.

And there were all these, there was a famous book called The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer, you know, that predicted that these new coding systems were going to mean we wouldn't have programmers in the future.

And of course, the number of programming jobs exploded by like a factor of 100.

Like my guess will be we'll have more, my guess is we'll have more coding jobs probably by like an order of magnitude 10 years from now.

But there will be, we will be creating so much more software that the whole industry will just explode in size.

Are you seeing the size of companies decrease in terms of startups with the landscapes of little tech?

All we're seeing right now is the AI hiring boom of all time.

Everybody's trying to hire as many engineers as they can to build AI systems.

I mean, there's a handful of companies, you know, there's a little bit, there's customer service.

You know, we have some companies and others, I think it's Klarna that's publicizing a lot of this in Europe, where, you know, there are jobs that can be optimized and jobs that can be automated.

But like for engineering jobs, like it's just an explosion of hiring.

At least so far, there's no trace of any sort of diminishing effect.

Now, having said that, I am looking forward to the day, I am waiting for the first company to walk in saying yes, like the more radical form of it.

So basically, the companies that we see are basically one of two kinds.

We see the companies that are basically, sometimes used weak form, strong form.

So the weak form companies, I sometimes use the term, it's called the sixth bullet point.

AI is the sixth bullet point on whatever they're doing.

So they've got the, you know, whatever, dot, dot, dot, dot, and then AI is the sixth thing.

And the reason AI is the sixth thing is because they had already previously written the slide before the AI revolution started.

So they just added the sixth bullet point on the slide, which is how you're getting all these products that have like the AI button up in the corner, right?

And all of a sudden, Gmail is offering to summarize your email, which I'm like, I don't need that.

Like, I need you to answer my email, not summarize it.