We're Now Programming Computers in English": How Much Code Does AI Write?
Faisal Adnan · 05 Nov 2026
How much new code is written by AI?
- Microsoft, 2025: around 20 to 30% of its code, according to its CEO.
- Google, April 2026: about 75% of new code is generated by AI and then reviewed by human developers, up from 25% in October 2024. The Decoder reported this.
- Anthropic, 2026: more than 90%, said its CFO Krishna Rao on a podcast, as TechSpot reported.
Notice the words "and then reviewed by human developers". The job changed from typing to reviewing.
Vibe coding
On 2 February 2025 Andrej Karpathy posted about a new kind of coding he called vibe coding, where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials and forget that the code even exists. By November 2025 Collins Dictionary had named it Word of the Year for 2025. CNN covered the choice. It is great for a quick prototype and a risky habit for production systems, as the Replit and Moltbook stories in other posts show.
Sixteen agents, one compiler
In February 2026 Anthropic's engineering team described how 16 agents wrote a C compiler of about 100,000 lines of Rust in two weeks, for a cost of roughly $20,000. It could compile the Linux kernel and PostgreSQL, and even run Doom. It was slower than the long-established GCC and not production-ready, and the write-up says so openly.
The money behind it
- Claude Code's run-rate revenue passed $2.5 billion in February 2026, and the number of weekly users had doubled since the start of the year.
- Cursor reached a valuation of $29.3 billion and more than $3 billion in annual recurring revenue by early 2026, and, according to its Wikipedia entry, was acquired and integrated into SpaceXAI from June 2026. The slide mentions a price of $60 billion.
- Around 5 million people use OpenAI's Codex weekly (June 2026), and GitHub Copilot had 4.7 million paid subscribers in January 2026. TechCrunch covered Satya Nadella's usage numbers for Microsoft's Copilot.
What it means if you are learning to code
- Learn to read code well. You will review more than you write.
- Learn the fundamentals: data structures, testing, databases and security. They let you tell good AI code from plausible AI code.
- Use AI for the first draft, and keep ownership of the design and the tests.
Sources
- The Decoder: Google says 75 percent of its new code is written by AI
- TechSpot: Anthropic says more than 90% of its code is written by AI
- Anthropic Engineering: building a C compiler with parallel Claudes
- Andrej Karpathy on X: vibe coding
- CNN via KVIA: vibe coding named Collins Dictionary's Word of the Year
- Simon Willison: quote from Anthropic on Claude Code revenue
- Wikipedia: Cursor (company)
- TechCrunch: Satya Nadella insists people are using Copilot a lot
Part of the talk "The AI Era" by Faisal Adnan, Riphah International University, 6 November 2026.