Cognition says AI now writes more than 90 percent of the code for the company
AI is eating away at the core work of software engineers – coding. From OpenAI to Anthropic to Google, companies are aggressively introducing agentic AI systems by writing the code while engineers step back to monitor and review the output. In fact, more than 90 percent of the code in Cognition is being generated by AI.
AI is rewriting the definition of software engineering. From being merely a coding assistant, AI systems are now becoming the primary authors of software, taking over the same tasks that once defined the profession. From OpenAI and Google to Anthropic, automation in coding is spreading to Silicon Valley and beyond. Now, San Francisco-based applied AI lab Cognition says AI is already doing 90 percent of the coding for it.
In a recent post on X, Cognition co-founder Scott Wu revealed that AI now writes more than 90 percent of the company’s code. “Think of software engineering as a pipeline. Historically, the hardest part was writing the code yourself. That’s no longer the case – honest question: How much of your code do you actually have to type at this point? For us it’s probably <10%," he wrote.
And the level of automation is only expected to increase. As AI agents become more capable, Wu argues that software engineers will need to shift their focus more toward planning, asking the right questions, and giving AI systems the right context to work.
“As agents become more capable, the barriers become less about writing code and more about two things: 1) It becomes easier for humans to understand, plan, and ask questions. 2) It becomes easier for agents to understand all the real-world context around your task,” he said.
Cognition is one of the companies that is already fully adopting AI in its software department. Just a day earlier, OpenAI revealed that one of its internal teams had shipped a product where every single line of code was generated by AI agents powered by Codex, with no direct coding input from human engineers. While engineers still supervised and reviewed the output, they did not write the code themselves. And reliance on AI for coding is apparently helping OpenAI and other companies increase productivity. The company said this workflow has accelerated growth by up to 10 times.
Something similar is happening inside Anthropic’s headquarters. Mike Krieger, the company’s chief product officer, recently revealed that the AI is writing almost 100 percent of the code for Anthropic internally. In other words, the cloud is now writing itself. “The cloud is being written by the cloud. Cloud products and cloud code are being written entirely by the cloud,” Krieger said in a conversation with Cisco President Jitu Patel.
Separately, XAI CEO Elon Musk has suggested that traditional coding could become obsolete by the end of 2026 as agentic AI systems become more advanced. Musk argues that programming could eventually look more like high-level instruction and creative direction rather than manual coding in programming languages.
“I think (by) the end of this year you won’t even bother coding. AI will create binaries straight away. And AI can create binaries far more efficient than any compiler,” Musk posted on
