Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg believes artificial intelligence will surpass human programmers within 18 months. In a recent podcast with Dwarkesh Patel, Zuckerberg said that most of the code for Meta’s Llama project will soon be written by AI. 

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AI to handle full coding tasks

Zuckerberg clarified that AI won’t just assist programmers but will independently execute complex development tasks. “If you give it a goal, it can run tests, it can find issues, it will write higher quality code than an average very good person on the team already,” he said.  

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Meta is building internal AI coding agents that are deeply integrated into its toolchain. These agents are being developed specifically to accelerate Llama research. “We are not trying to build a general developer tool,” Zuckerberg explained. “We are making it for a specific goal... It is going to end up being an important part of how stuff gets done.”  

Industry-wide trend towards AI-Driven code

Zuckerberg's remarks align with a broader industry shift. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella revealed at LlamaCon that up to 30 per cent of the company’s code is already generated by AI tools. Google CEO Sundar Pichai has said that 25 per cent of its code is written by AI, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman noted that AI now writes half the code in some companies.  

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Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicts that by the end of 2025, AI will be able to generate all code, with an initial estimate of 90 percent in the next three to six months. GitLab’s 2024 survey found that 78 per cent of developers are using or planning to use AI tools for coding.  

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Zuckerberg also recently adjusted his timeline for AI writing mid-level engineer-quality code from 2025 to mid-2026. Studies also point to current limitations. A joint Microsoft-Meta research paper recently found large language models could solve fewer than half the debugging tasks on the SWE-bench Lite benchmark.  

Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott said on a recent podcast that 95 per cent of code could be AI-generated by 2030, with humans shifting to architecture and intent. Scott, however, argued that instead of replacing engineers, AI would elevate the role of human engineers to higher levels of abstraction (authorship, design).