Elon Musk says AI has taken hard work out of coding, predicts seismic shift in tech jobs

Elon Musk, CEO of xAI, has predicted a major change in coding-related jobs in the near future due to the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). The billionaire has claimed that AI has taken out much of the “drudgery” from writing software and that coding could soon become more like painting as a “recreational” activity rather than a functional job.

Replying to a post by OpenAI President Greg Brockman, Musk wrote: “AI has taken a lot of the drudgery out of writing software. But, in the fairly near future, writing software will be like being a painter: In the old days, you needed a professional painter to spend many days just to make one selfie (fka a portrait) just so people could know what you looked like! Now, you can make a video selfie instantly & effortlessly. There are still people who paint, of course, but it’s recreational, rather than functional.”

Notably, Elon Musk was one of the co-founders of OpenAI, the organisation behind ChatGPT. He later had a public falling-out with fellow co-founder and current CEO Sam Altman. In response, the billionaire launched his own artificial intelligence company, xAI, which merged with the social media platform X (formerly Twitter).

xAI runs the Grok AI chatbot, which rivals ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude in a closely contested AI rat race. While coding has been a major focus point for generative AI startups from the beginning, these companies have recently begun rolling out full-fledged AI agents for coding-related tasks.

OpenAI unveiled its Codex AI agent earlier this year, with the goal of building a “software engineering agent in the cloud.” Meanwhile, Microsoft recently introduced GitHub Spark AI, which can create apps using just natural language prompts.

As for xAI, the company recently released an advanced coding assistant called Grok 4 during the recent Grok release. The new feature supports over 20 programming languages and allows developers to integrate code directly with code editors, allowing them to write, debug and explain code using natural language.