'Zero percent': Why Nvidia's Jensen Huang, CEO of world's biggest tech company, wants techies to stop coding

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has said he wants his engineers to spend “exactly zero percent” of their time writing code, as the $3 trillion chipmaker pushes deeper into using AI assistants at work. Huang believes AI should take over routine coding so humans can focus on solving problems that have never been solved before.

Huang made the comments on the No Priors AI podcast, where he said every Nvidia engineer now uses Cursor, an AI coding assistant, throughout the workday. His aim is to remove what he calls the burden of syntax from engineers’ lives.

No coding give me joy: Huang

“Nothing would give me more joy than if none of our engineers were coding at all,” Huang said. “And they were just purely solving undiscovered problems.”


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According to Huang, writing code is only a task, not the real goal of engineering. The real purpose, he argues, is identifying new problems and creating solutions that do not yet exist. AI, in his view, should handle the task so humans can focus on the purpose.

Purpose vs task: Huang’s core idea
Huang has been repeating this “Purpose vs Task” idea in several public conversations, including a widely shared appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience. The logic is straightforward: coding is necessary, but it is not the end goal. Discovery and innovation are.

By shifting routine work to AI tools, Huang believes engineers will move into more ambitious and creative roles rather than becoming less relevant.

Why radiologists survived the AI wave

To explain his point, Huang often refers to radiology. Years ago, AI researcher Geoffrey Hinton predicted that radiologists would become obsolete because computers could read medical scans faster than humans. That did not happen. In fact, the number of radiologists increased.

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Huang says the reason is simple. Reading scans was just the task. Diagnosing disease and improving patient outcomes was the purpose. When AI reduced the workload, the demand for human judgement grew.

At a recent Nvidia all-hands meeting, Huang reportedly challenged managers who were asking teams to limit AI use. “Are you insane?” he said, according to Business Insider. He also told employees they would still have plenty of work, just work that aimed higher.

AI writes more code, but doubts remain

Huang’s push comes as AI-generated code becomes more common across the tech industry. Google CEO Sundar Pichai has said AI now writes over 30% of new code at Google. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has claimed that Claude produces 90% of his company’s code.

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At the same time, reality looks more complicated. A METR study published in July found that AI tools actually reduced productivity for experienced developers by 19%, even though those developers expected a 20% improvement. The findings suggest that fully code-free engineering may still be some distance away.

Cursor CEO and others urge caution

However, not everyone agrees with Huang’s optimism. Michael Truell, the CEO of Cursor, has warned against “vibe coding,” where developers rely on AI output without checking it.

“If you close your eyes and don't look at the code and have AIs build things with shaky foundations, things start to kind of crumble,” Truell said at Fortune’s Brainstorm AI conference.

Even Andrej Karpathy, the former Tesla AI head who popularised the term “vibe coding,” has admitted limits. He said his recent Nanochat project was “basically entirely hand-written” because AI agents “just didn't work well enough.” Karpathy also warned programmers, saying, “I've never felt this much behind. The profession is being dramatically refactored.”