New York: In a significant forecast about the future of software engineering, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has stated that artificial intelligence will write most of the code for Meta’s Llama project within the next 12 to 18 months. Speaking in a podcast interview with Dwarkesh Patel, Zuckerberg emphasized that this shift goes far beyond current AI capabilities like autocomplete — he believes AI will soon be able to independently test, debug, and write code at a level surpassing even the best human engineers.
“I think sometime in the next 12 to 18 months, we will reach the point where most of these codes that are going towards these efforts will be written by AI. And I don’t mean like autocomplete. Today, you have good autocomplete, where if you start writing, it [AI] can complete that section of the code. I mean, 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” ,Zuckerberg explained.
According to Zuckerberg, Meta is currently developing multiple AI-driven coding agents and research assistants designed specifically to accelerate progress on Llama — Meta’s family of open-source large language models. These agents are not intended for general use by external developers but are tailored to Meta’s internal workflows and tightly integrated into its engineering toolchain.
“We are working on a number of coding agents inside Meta, because we are not really an enterprise software company, we are primarily building it for ourselves. So, we are making it for a specific goal. We are not trying to build a general developer tool, we are trying to build a coding agent and an AI research agent that basically advances Llama research specifically. It is fully plugged into our tool chain. I think that’s important. And it is going to end up being an important part of how stuff gets done”, he said.
Zuckerberg previously made similar remarks earlier this year, asserting that Meta is headed toward a future where AI engineers — not human engineers — will create both the code powering Meta’s applications and the AI models themselves.
“We will get to a point where all the code in our apps and the AI it generates will also be written by AI engineers instead of people engineers” ,he noted at the time.
This bold prediction aligns with a broader trend across the tech industry, where companies are rapidly adopting AI-assisted development. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently shared a parallel outlook, forecasting that 90% of code will be generated by AI in the next three to six months, with full automation expected by the end of 2025.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai also disclosed that 25% of the code at Google is already written by AI, while OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has claimed that AI now writes up to 50% of the code in some companies.
As AI continues to reshape software development, the role of human engineers may evolve toward higher-level problem-solving, system architecture, and oversight — rather than writing code line-by-line.
