Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…So I think, hopefully, at least in the near to midterm, for many engineers, it frees up more and more of the… Even in engineering and coding, there are aspects which are so much fun. You’re designing. You’re architecting. You’re solving a problem. There’s a lot of grant work, which all goes hand in hand, but hopefully, it takes a lot of that away, makes it even more fun to code ,frees you up more time to create, problem, solve, brainstorm with your fellow colleagues and so on, right? So that’s the opportunity there. Second, I think it’ll attract, it’ll put the creative power in more people’s hands, which means people will create more. That means there’ll be more engineers doing more things. So it’s tough to fully predict, but I think in general, in this moment, it feels like people adopt these tools and be better programmers. Like, there are more people playing chess now than ever before, right? So it feels positive that way, to me, at least, speaking from within a Google context, is how I would talk to them about it. Still. I just know anecdotally, a lot of great programmers are generating a lot of code, so their productivity, they’re not always using all the code. There’s still a lot of editing, but even for me, still programming as a side thing, I think I’m like 5x more productive. I think even for a large code base that’s touching a lot of users like Google’s does, I’m imagining, very soon, that productivity should be going up even more. No. The big unlock will be as we make the agentic capabilities much more robust, right? I think that’s what unlocks that next big wave. I think the 10% is a massive number. Like, if tomorrow, I showed up and said, “You can improve a large organization’s productivity by 10%,” when you have tens of thousands of engineers, that’s a phenomenal number, and that’s different than what other site or statistic saying like, “This percentage of code is now written by AI.” I’m talking more about, like, overall-…

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