Why Boris Cherny Wants CS Grads to Skip Job Hunts and Build AI Startups
The ink on your computer science diploma isn't even dry, and the tech elite is already telling you your coding skills are obsolete. Welcome to the era of building empires with nothing but an AI assistant and a dream.
During an address to fresh university graduates, Boris Cherny, the mind behind Claude Code, urged young tech talents to ditch traditional entry-level job applications entirely and launch startups instead.
According to this vision, the barrier to entry has hit rock bottom because artificial intelligence can now do the heavy lifting. To prove his point, Cherny recalled a recent gathering of new founders at the elite startup accelerator Y Combinator. When he asked the room full of future tech moguls who among them lets AI write 100% of their software, half of the hands shot up. Out of several hundred participants, exactly one lone rebel admitted to writing all their code by hand, while the rest freely outsourced over half of their daily tasks to algorithms.
This shift in who actually builds things has caught the attention of venture capital. OpenAI boss Sam Altman noted that investors are pivoting away from hunting down pure technical geniuses. Instead, the money is now flowing toward founders who do not even know how to write a single line of code, but possess a deep, almost spiritual understanding of what human customers actually want to buy.
While the job title of "engineer" might eventually end up in the museum of dead tech professions, the headcount of people orchestrating these AI agents is projected to multiply a hundredfold. Meanwhile, Nvidia chief Jensen Huang offered a slightly more grounded mathematical spin on the situation, pointing out that the world's 40 million professional developers currently take home about $3 trillion in collective salaries, but with AI tools in hand, they are already generating $9 trillion worth of actual output.
The ultimate dream of the tech elite has finally come true: a world where everyone is a CEO, nobody actually codes, and venture capitalists write checks to people who just vibe with the market. Whether this glorious future results in a trillion-dollar software boom or an infinite loop of AI-generated bugs screaming at other AI-generated bugs remains to be seen.
Source: Business Insider
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