Engineers are becoming artists and artists are turning into engineers, all thanks to AI—at least according to Logan Kilpatrick, who leads product for Google AI Studio and the Gemini API. In a post on X that’s racked up over 627,000 views, Kilpatrick captured what he sees as a fundamental shift in how creative and technical work now overlap. “Engineers are artists now thanks to AI,” he wrote, “and artists are becoming engineers, all in a positive sense.”The comment reflects a growing sentiment in Silicon Valley that AI coding tools are erasing traditional boundaries between disciplines. Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently said AI now writes over 30% of new code at Google, while Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei claimed Claude generates 90% of his company’s code. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has gone even further, saying he wants his engineers to stop writing code entirely and focus instead on “discovering undiscovered problems.” At Nvidia’s recent all-hands meeting, Huang reportedly pushed back against managers who told teams to reduce AI usage, asking bluntly: “Are you insane?”
AI tools expanding access beyond traditional coders
Kilpatrick’s observation aligns with Pichai’s recent comments that “vibe coding”—using AI to build software with minimal technical knowledge—is making development “exciting again” and more accessible to non-technical workers. From HR professionals to accountants, people across industries are now using tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Cursor to prototype apps and automate workflows without formal coding training.
Reality check: productivity gains remain uncertain
But the optimism isn’t universal. Michael Truell, CEO of Cursor—the $29 billion AI coding assistant Nvidia has adopted company-wide—warned developers against blindly trusting AI-generated code. “If you close your eyes and have AIs build things with shaky foundations, things start to kind of crumble,” he told Fortune. Research backs up the skepticism: a METR study found AI assistants actually decreased experienced developers’ productivity by 19%, despite participants expecting significant gains.Even Andrej Karpathy, the former Tesla AI director who coined the term “vibe coding,” admitted his recent project was “basically entirely hand-written” because AI agents “just didn’t work well enough.” His warning to fellow programmers: “I’ve never felt this much behind. The profession is being dramatically refactored.“
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