Nvidia’s software engineers are writing less code than ever, and according to their CEO, they like it that way.
Jensen Huang said this week that his engineers would rather build AI agents than write Python, making the change more of a promotion than a threat.
“These agent systems are new skills, and now we have a lot of software engineers building agents,” Huang said in an interview published by the company on Wednesday.
“If you ask me, every one of my software engineers would rather be a construction agent than write Python code.” It’s a message he’s been honing for months, a Carnegie Mellon begins for Computex stage.
The distinction he draws is between coding as a task and engineering as a craft. The writing part of the job, the mundane task of turning an idea into syntax, is now something an agent can handle, he said.
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“You’re doing all the day-to-day work and you’re trying to make this agent do it,” he said. “It takes imagination, it takes creativity, it takes a lot of technology.” Instead of drawing Python, engineers spend their days building agents, writing benchmarks, and designing the guardrails that keep these systems in check.
An AI agent breaks down a large goal into a sequence of smaller steps, each controlled in turn, so that the program can plan and act rather than simply answering a question.
Huang, who co-founded Nvidia in 1993, has become one of the most vocal advocates for putting AI assistants to work in companies. He repeatedly envisioned a future where Nvidia deployed agents in every unit to boost productivity. chips and platforms who controls them.
This commercial logic is never far from the surface. Nvidia has spent the past year positioning itself as the infrastructure beneath the agent economy, and the workforce building agents is also the workforce consuming more compute.
“All Jobs”
Where Huang sets his company apart from several of his peers is what all this means for employment. He dismissed increasingly common warnings that artificial intelligence would hollow out white-collar jobs, arguing that technology is creating roles rather than erasing them.
“The amount of work we have to do to bring artificial intelligence to the world is truly incredible” he said. “So it creates a lot of jobs. And my software engineers love it.”
The optimism sets him apart from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, ​​both of whom have warned that artificial intelligence could eliminate many entry-level and administrative jobs.
Huang has consistently rejected this framework, as other firms have reported agent progress slower than the hype suggests.
“That’s the part that people don’t understand about AI. The first thing that AI is doing right now is creating a lot of jobs.He said in a television interview in May.
“AI creates jobs. AI is America’s best opportunity to re-industrialize ourselves.”
Whether that applies to the broader economy is a separate question from what’s happening inside Nvidia, where Huang’s engineers still work hard. His argument is narrower and harder to argue, as giving skilled people better tools eliminates much of the hard work.
For now, the pitch is as much about investors as it is about employees. A company whose engineers refer to agents by default is a persuasive advertisement for the hardware Nvidia sells, and Huang knows it.
The real test will be whether his enthusiasm rubs off on the messier parts of software work, where judgment, debugging, and accountability still fall to humans. After all, building an agent is a special kind of coding.
