Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has revealed that artificial intelligence will soon take over the majority of the coding responsibilities for the company’s Llama project, with AI expected to write most of the code within the next 12 to 18 months. In a podcast interview with Dwarkesh Patel, Zuckerberg said AI is already performing at the level of an “average very good person” on a software team and will soon surpass even the top engineers. “I think sometime in the next 12 to 18 months, we will reach the point where most of these codes that are going towards these efforts will be written by AI,” he said. “And I don’t mean like autocomplete. Today, you have good autocomplete, where if you start writing, it [AI] can complete that section of the code. I mean, if you give it a goal, it can run tests, it can find issues, it will write higher quality code.”
AI to Outperform Top Coders
Zuckerberg emphasised that the role of AI at Meta has evolved beyond simple code suggestions. The technology is now capable of handling more complex tasks, such as independent test execution and bug detection. “It will write higher quality code than an average very good person on the team already,” he noted. This capability, he explained, goes far beyond today’s autocomplete tools, and points toward a future where AI systems take on a majority of the software development workload.
Meta Builds In-House Coding Agents
The Meta CEO also outlined the company’s efforts to develop internal AI agents specifically aimed at enhancing its Llama large language models. “We are working on a number of coding agents inside Meta,” Zuckerberg said. “We’re not trying to build a general developer tool. We’re trying to build a coding agent and an AI research agent that basically advances Llama research specifically. It is fully plugged into our tool chain.” He added that Meta is not pursuing enterprise software commercialisation in this space, but is focused on internal productivity and AI research acceleration.
Zuckerberg previously expressed a similar outlook earlier this year, stating that “we will get to a point where all the code in our apps and the AI it generates will also be written by AI engineers instead of people engineers.” Meta’s Llama models are part of its broader AI strategy to compete with leading players in the field. With AI set to become a key developer inside the company, human engineers may increasingly shift toward oversight, design, and long-term innovation.