🚨 OpenAI’s Big Claim: AI Isn’t Killing Coding Jobs, It’s Making Them Better
In Q1 2025 alone, more than 76,000 jobs were lost to automation, and nearly 40% of employers expect cuts where AI can take over. With the rise of agentic AI, the fear is real: if coding assistants can debug and refactor code in seconds, what role is left for human developers?
💡 But OpenAI sees it differently. With its new GPT-5 Codex, the company argues coding isn’t dying, it’s evolving. Instead of replacing developers, Codex promises to accelerate creativity, reasoning, and problem-solving.
🧠 “I see new graduates on my team picking up programming at a speed I haven’t witnessed before,” Thibault Sottiaux, engineering lead for Codex at OpenAI, told me. “If you look at today’s AI tools, it’s clear they’re far from perfect. There’s still so much capacity in the world to absorb better, more powerful, and more delightful software.”
📊 Benchmarks back the claim. On SWE-bench Verified, GPT-5 Codex solved over half of code-fixing challenges, up from roughly one-third for its predecessor.
📌 OpenAI isn’t the only big player arguing that AI isn’t the IT job killer many feared. “Every minute, five to eight people sign up for a generative AI class on our platform,” Hugo Sarrazin, CEO of Udemy, told me. “Designing code requires critical thinking, which is fundamentally a human trait. Of course, AI will generate a lot more software, but you still need analysis, judgment, and testing.
⚔️ But skeptics like Jan Chorowski, CTO at Pathway (ex-Google Brain), remain unconvinced. “The key differentiation we have today, as humans, is the ability to come up with new ideas grounded in context,” he said. “AI lacks such contextualized judgment. Changing this is the challenge for the next decade.”
👉 Read my full analysis on Fast Company: https://lnkd.in/dddY77P5
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