Will Coding Become Obsolete

There is ongoing hype about how AI will replace manual coding. For example Elon Musk stated about a week ago that "things will move maybe even by the end of this year to where you don't even bother doing coding." AI models will just generate the needed binary directly.

Coding Obsolete?

After using OpenCode for many sessions and rewriting a Rust program with agents, I am less skeptical about these claims. AI agents do work. One can just prompt the AI agent to make changes to the code and it handles the syntax and deals with the necessary language features directly.

Most of the time, I do involved prompting —I have the AI agent do precise steps as I have a clear picture of what I want to happen. But part of this is due to the lower-powered models I use—I like to run Qwen locally on llama-cpp.

So for my own situation, I am still deeply involved in the code. But as models become more powerful, it seems likely a person would need less involvement in the code, and the AI agent could take over more aspects. In my opinion, it might take longer than the end of 2026, but coding will certainly change (it already has) and will mostly involve prompting AI agents.