Elon Musk predicts the programming profession will ‘die’ by the end of this year

ByEditor

Feb 15, 2026

Elon Musk predicts the programming profession will ‘die’ by the end of this year

Elon Musk believes that AI will progress rapidly and be able to program effectively, making traditional coding no longer necessary.

“Things will change, maybe by the end of this year, to the point where you don’t even need to write your own code anymore. AI will directly create binary code,” Elon Musk said at this week’s all-employee meeting of xAI – an artificial intelligence company that just merged with aerospace company SpaceX in early February.

According to Musk, AI can generate binary code more efficiently than any compiler. Users simply ask the AI to generate binary code optimized for a specific output, bypassing the traditional programming process and eliminating the need for intermediate steps. Musk added: “We expect Grok Code to reach its most advanced level in the next 2-3 months. Everything is happening very fast.”

xAI released Grok Code Fast 1 in the middle of last year, saying the strength of this model is “the ability to deliver high performance in a compact, economical design”, becoming a flexible choice for quickly handling common programming tasks at low cost.

Elon Musk (right) at xAI’s all-employee meeting in February 2026. Image: xAI

During xAI’s company-wide meeting, Musk outlined his plan to build a comprehensive AI company, competing in large language models (LLMs), image and video generation systems, and programming tools. He and a number of other leaders said the company is making efforts to recruit talent in the context of competition for top AI researchers becoming increasingly fierce.

Musk also announced a restructuring of xAI as it has reached a certain scale and aims to operate more efficiently at that scale. “Of course, when this happens, there will be people who are more suitable for the early stages of the company and less suitable for the later stages,” he explains. This announcement was made after xAI co-founders Tony Wu and Jimmy Ba left on February 9 and February 10, respectively.

In addition to Musk, many other technology leaders also believe that AI will replace traditional programming. In the above interview Mindsets Podcast By mid-2023, Emad Mostaque, CEO of Stability AI, commented that “in the next 5 years there will no longer be any human programmers”. During the fourth quarter 2025 earnings call this week, Gustav Soderstrom, Spotify co-CEO, said that the company’s best programmers have “not written a single line of code since December last year” thanks to AI support.