At Google, 75% of new code is AI-written. At Anthropic and OpenAI, 100%. The job moved from writer to editor.
The humans stopped writing first.
It happened faster than anyone said it would.
Share of new code at Google now written by AI. Stated by Sundar Pichai at Cloud Next, April 2026.
Source · Alphabet IR · blog.google
From Q3 2024 to Q4 2025, AI-written code at Google climbed from 25% to 50%. That's 18 months for 25 points.
From February 4 to April 22 of 2026 — eleven weeks — it climbed another 25 points. The last jump was as big as the first four combined.
The curve isn't slowing down. It's accelerating.
Until late 2025, AI wrote code as autocomplete. A sentence here, a function there. Useful, but still the human at the keyboard doing most of the typing.
Then coding agents went mainstream. Claude Code. Cursor. OpenAI Codex. Copilot Workspace. The contract changed: write a ticket, get a pull request. The human stopped writing lines and started writing tasks.
Cursor hit $2B ARR by February 2026. GitHub Copilot crossed 20 million users. The agents didn't arrive. They overtook. That's how 50% becomes 75% in under three months. Not a better model. A different mode.
Methodology varies by company · Directionally consistent
The builders are 12 to 18 months ahead of the users.
Which means the rest of the industry is already on the curve. They just haven't looked down yet.
The old contract: an engineer writes the first draft, another reviews it. Both are authors. Both leave their fingerprints.
The new contract: the model writes the first draft, the human accepts, rejects, or redirects. The model is the author. The human is the editor.
The labour moved one step up the stack. The writer's chair became the editor's desk.
When the camera arrived, illustrators moved up the stack.
When the model arrived, engineers moved up the stack.
Same pattern, different tool. Every time the drafting got mechanised, humans moved to judgement. Not a new crisis. A familiar move.
If AI writes 100% of the code, the fair question is: what's the job?
Spec the system. Review the output. Architect the trade-offs. Test what matters. Debug what slips. Decide what to ship next. None of that scales linearly with output — more code means more reviewing, more directing, more judgement.
Anthropic employs around 5,000 people to do this. The human work didn't get cheaper. It got denser. A team of editors producing the output of an army of writers.
The strategist writes the deck. The brand director writes the campaign. The copywriter writes the page. The designer drafts the layout. The lawyer drafts the clause. The analyst drafts the model.
In every one of those roles, the first draft is a cost, not a product. It's what has to exist before the judgement can begin. Whatever can produce that draft faster will. Whatever can produce it for free will win.
Adobe Firefly generated 22 billion creative assets in its first two years. I've shipped 20+ AI-native products in 18 months. I didn't write the first draft of any of them. The design curve is already well up. The strategy curve is right behind.
The ceiling varies. Novel research still hits limits. Boilerplate doesn't. Taste-dependent work lands somewhere in between. But every job has a first-draft task. And every first-draft task is on the curve.
Code is the canary because code is countable.
Tokens shipped. Commits merged. Lines written. You can put a number on it. Strategy, brand, editorial — the numbers are fuzzier. The curve is the same.
I don't always know exactly what I want up front. But I know when the output isn't it — and that's enough. Reject, redirect, refine. Not because I can describe the right answer in advance, but because I recognise the wrong one the moment it arrives.
Twenty-plus AI-native products in 18 months. I didn't write the first draft of any of them. I knew when each one wasn't ready. That's the whole skill.
"Edited by Humans" becomes a quality signal.
Like grass-fed. Like hand-stitched.
When the machine writes the first draft of everything, human judgement becomes the premium. The stamp goes on the work worth paying for.
The first draft belongs to the machine.
The last call still belongs to you.
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