Top Programmers Now Focus on Directing AI, Not Writing Code

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt says that top programmers have quietly redefined their job. They no longer write code, but instead focus on creating specifications and evaluating output. This shift is a sign of AI's growing impact on industries, according to Schmidt.

Schmidt shared an example from one of his startups, where a programmer defines what he wants the AI to build each evening at 7 PM, writes a test function to judge the output, and lets the system run overnight. By breakfast time, the work is done, taking only a fraction of the time it would have taken a team of programmers.

Schmidt believes that the best programmers will not be replaced by AI, but instead become even more valuable. They will focus on directing AI systems at scale and grasping parallelization, which requires a deep understanding of the problem and what 'good' looks like.