Quote of the day from OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy: “The most popular new programming language is English,” signaling the shift towards natural language dominance in the age of AI
AI has changed many aspects of the professional world, especially the practice of software development and engineering. A number of tools and platforms now allow programmers to use AI assistants and co-pilots (as well as swarms of agents) to work on building systems autonomously, according to instructions. And for a key figure in the AI space, this was inevitable.
“The most popular new programming language is English”
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In a viral post on the social media platform
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This article is part of TechRadar Pro’s QOTD project to provide insights into the minds of the tech industry’s brightest and most recognizable figures today and in years past. Read the entire series here.
ChatGPT had launched a few months earlier and developers were already familiar with the basic level of coding the chatbot could perform, especially in popular languages like Python and HTML. Much of this also relied on simple text-based instructions, meaning that AI models could understand and process natural language and produce complex programming in a way that had not been seen before.
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Karpathy, who in 2024 co-founded Eureka Labs, an educational AI platform, summed up the sentiment perfectly, with the tech industry in the process of understanding the full implications of this technology.
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Karpathy added in a follow-up post that many examples in the scientific literature showed that natural language was capable of using AI to engage in complex programming. These findings served as collective precursors to many enterprise features we see in widespread use today, such as GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, and others.
However, the rise of vibe coding and instruction-based programming also means that the nature of work is changing for many software developers. Many now simply review the code instead of writing it themselves, participating in validation and debugging.
Therefore, the role of software development is becoming something that requires fewer and fewer young people. However, this can have other unintended consequences, including the traditional career path changing permanently.
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