Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt says the most valuable programmers in the world have quietly redefined their job. They don’t write code anymore. They write specifications, set evaluation criteria, hit run—and go to bed. It’s a shift that Schmidt believes signals something much larger than a change in workflow—it’s the beginning of AI reshaping how entire industries operate.Schmidt described a programmer at one of his startups who does exactly this. Every evening at 7 PM, he defines what he wants the AI to build, writes a test function to judge the output, and lets the system loose. Then he has dinner with his wife and goes to sleep. The AI churns through the night, finishing around 4 AM. By breakfast, the work is done. “This stuff would’ve taken me six months and 10 programmers at Google,” Schmidt said. “This poor guy’s sleeping.”
The best programmers won’t be replaced by AI—they’ll become even more valuable
The natural assumption is that AI will make programmers obsolete. Schmidt thinks the opposite is true—at least for the elite ones. Top-tier engineers were always disproportionately valuable, worth roughly 10 times more than those just below them. That gap, he argued, is about to widen. The grunt work is disappearing, but the ability to orchestrate AI systems at scale—grasping parallelisation, defining the right constraints, judging when the output is good enough—is becoming the entire job.The real skill now isn’t writing code, Schmidt suggested. It’s framing the problem correctly and knowing what “good” looks like. “If you can define the evaluation function and you can let it run, and if you have enough hardware, you’re inventing worlds,” he said. AI systems at leading research labs are already handling a significant and growing share of programming work, making the engineers who direct them more critical, not less.
Schmidt says AI’s real impact will be automating the ‘boring’ backbone of business
Yet the bigger story, Schmidt argued, isn’t about programmers at all. AI’s largest economic payoff will come from automating the dull, expensive plumbing of corporate operations—billing, accounting, inventory management, delivery logistics—processes that silently drain billions from company budgets every year. “If anything, it’s under-hyped because you are fundamentally automating businesses,” he said at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum.He predicted artificial general intelligence could arrive as early as 2029, powered by recursive self-improvement—AI systems that learn and plan on their own, without waiting for human instruction. Schmidt also pointed to medicine, climate solutions, and engineering as fields where AI-driven automation could unlock breakthroughs that remain largely untapped today.
