As the AI revolution speeds ahead, most of the public conversation has focused on one looming concern: job loss. While tech giants talk up the benefits of artificial intelligence, many workers are understandably nervous—and now, even the people building AI might not be safe from being replaced by it.
In a surprising twist, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently shared a vision of the future that’s raising eyebrows—especially among his own developers. Speaking at the closing keynote of LlamaCon, Zuckerberg hinted that artificial intelligence could soon be doing half of all coding at Meta.
It all started when Zuckerberg asked Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella how much of Microsoft’s code is currently written by AI. The question bounced back to him, and while he didn’t have hard data, Zuckerberg made a bold prediction:
“Our bet is sort of that in the next year… maybe half the development is going to be done by AI as opposed to people, and that will kind of increase from there.”
That comment immediately set off alarm bells. Many interpreted it as a sign that Meta could be preparing to downsize its engineering workforce—replacing developers with algorithms. But Zuckerberg was quick to clarify: he doesn’t see AI as a replacement, but as a tool to boost productivity.
“Every engineer is effectively going to end up being more of like a tech lead,” he explained. With AI writing code, developers will have “their own little army of agents that they work with.”
In other words, humans won’t disappear from the process—they’ll just oversee the machines doing the bulk of the work. Still, that’s a tough sell for employees who spent years learning how to write code, not supervise it. Understandably, not everyone’s thrilled at the idea of being turned into a manager of AI bots.
This shift also brings up bigger ethical and safety questions. If AI is allowed to develop more AI with limited human involvement, who’s keeping it in check?
Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic (a company backed by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos), has warned about the dangers of giving AI too much independence. He believes that if artificial intelligence starts conducting its own research and development, tech companies must drastically ramp up safety protocols.
And he’s not alone. As more companies hand over coding tasks to AI systems—many of which are designed to improve and evolve themselves—concerns about control, oversight, and accountability are only going to grow.
While some, like Bill Gates, predict a future where AI gives people more freedom—possibly reducing the workweek to just two or three days—others see a more complicated reality. For now, Zuckerberg’s comments suggest a major shift is coming to Meta’s engineering teams. Whether that’s a boost to productivity or a red flag for job security depends on which side of the AI equation you’re on.
