In his keynote on Wednesday, Benoit Schillings, vice president of Technology at Google DeepMind and formerly CTO at Google X, said he’s finally given up on coding his own software and has handed it off to agents.
Schillings said he was a bit new to DeepMind, having moved over from Google X only 18 months ago, and said the shift was “an interesting formative experience.” He explained that he’d been writing code for 45 years, inspired by the desire to write better Apple games, and said he was “pretty resistant to change” on that score. But that has changed.
“It’s about superhuman syntax generation. The last time I got Gemini to write a function for me, and I looked at it, and I was like, ‘do that better.’ Now it's over. I think that the minutiae of code writing can now be generated. Our time is gone.”
Humans still have a role, but it’s more in application and systems design. Humans are still better than machines at that — for now — but, with about 80% of code in GitHub now machine-generated, the era of the human code writer and checker is drawing to a close.
“I would predict that within one year we'll let Gemini or other models generate the code, and nobody will actually look at it, you know,” he told the crowd. “It's similar to compilers. Who still changes the assembly output of their compiler?”
