OpenAI may be in a race to build the best AI coding agent, but its chairman is still happy to do things the old-fashioned way.
“I am trying to get to a world where I’m not writing code,” Bret Taylor told Stripe cofounder John Collison during a recent episode of Collison’s “Cheeky Pint” podcast. “It’s hard, emotionally, if that makes any sense. I have a hard time not caring.”
Taylor’s struggle mirrors some others in AI and tech who are seeing the building blocks of their careers bulldozed by advancements in agentic AI. Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code, recently said Anthropic’s rival coding tool has “practically solved” coding.
Taylor said that he cares about the “correctness” and “robustness” of his code, but he’s trying to teach himself to put less stock into his feelings.
“I’ve been trying to force myself to not care because I feel like I won’t be a self-actualized software engineer in the future if I’m too precious about that artifact which used to be so central to me,” he said.
Some software engineers are beginning to question what their job is now that most coding is automated. Others have said that coding by hand could be an artisan-type skill akin to saddlemaking in a world dominated by cars.
“That’s a luxury that perhaps is akin to what a modern saddle maker enjoys when you go, “Oh, the letter’s just right, and the stitching is just right.’ And you’re like, ‘Okay, but you’re no longer part of the main production for transportation,'” Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson said in January. “And I’m like, ‘Well, so what?’ I’ll continue to make my handwritten code saddles as long as I can for my enjoyment.”
Taylor said he doesn’t mind chatting with OpenAI’s Codex, but he’s still not quite sure what future tools will bring to the table.
“I also think, as you imagine, all the tests that you care about, it showing you demos and mockups,” he said. “I wonder what the future integrated development environment, for lack of a better term, will be in that world. “
While he joked about creating “bespoke artisanal code,” Taylor said that coding was “my entire life before.” He’s still figuring out what the era of AI will bring.
“I was proud of the elegance of the code that I wrote,” he said. “But if I still care about the craftsmanship, what do I want? I haven’t quite visualized it yet.”
