Can AI create an app with just a prompt? ChatGPT creator OpenAI is working toward that future by developing an AI agent that can replace crucial work currently done by human software engineers.
At a Goldman Sachs conference last month, OpenAI’s Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar said that OpenAI is preparing an AI agent that goes beyond helping software engineers — it does all of their duties for them. Instead of simply completing lines of code or generating new code, the agent acts on its own to create apps, run quality assurance tests, test for bugs, and write documentation.
“It’s literally an agentic software engineer that can build an app for you,” Friar said. “Not only does it build it, it does all the things that software engineers hate to do. So suddenly you can force multiply your software engineering workforce.”
OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar. Photographer: Lauren Justice/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The AI agent, called A-SWE, will be OpenAI’s third agent tool. In January, the AI startup released Operator, an AI agent that can shop for groceries or make dinner reservations. One month later, the AI startup launched Deep Research, an AI agent that surfs the web to generate in-depth research reports.
OpenAI isn’t the first to develop an AI software engineer. In March 2024, Cognition AI released a coding assistant named Devin, claiming that it was the first AI software engineer. However, the AI was only able to complete three out of 20 coding tasks in an independent test.
As AI’s coding skills improve, industry leaders are warning that it may take over software engineering roles. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei stated last month that AI could write “essentially all of the code” within a year, expressing “a fair amount of concern” about the impact of AI on jobs. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan in January that Meta is working on an AI that writes code as well as “a midlevel engineer” this year.
Meanwhile, Google indicated in October that AI wrote one-fourth of “all new code” at the company.
Related: Amazon Cloud CEO Predicts a Future Where Most Software Engineers Don’t Code — and AI Does It Instead
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said last month that the skills needed to excel in tech have changed because of AI. He stated that “the most obvious tactical thing is just get really good at using AI tools” instead of mastering how to code.
“At some point, yeah, maybe we do need less software engineers,” Altman said.
OpenAI stated earlier this month that it had raised $40 billion at a $300 billion valuation.