From Writing Code to Designing AI Agents: Nvidia’s Jensen Huang Says AI Is Transforming...

Jensen Huang says artificial intelligence is fundamentally changing the work of software engineers, shifting them away from writing routine code and toward designing AI agents that automate repetitive tasks, a transition he believes is creating new jobs rather than eliminating them.

In an interview published by Nvidia on Wednesday, Huang said the company's engineers are embracing AI because it allows them to focus on more creative and higher-value work.

"These agentic systems are new skills, and now we have a lot of software engineers building agents," he said.

He added: "If you ask me, every one of my software engineers prefers to be building agents than to be writing Python code."

Huang explained that AI is changing the nature of software development at Nvidia. Instead of spending most of their time writing code line by line, engineers are increasingly designing AI systems capable of carrying out complex tasks autonomously.

AI agents are software systems that can plan, reason, and execute multi-step tasks by breaking larger objectives into smaller, manageable actions. Rather than simply generating code, these systems can perform research, automate workflows, evaluate results, and interact with other software with minimal human intervention.

According to Huang, Nvidia's engineers now spend less time on routine programming and more time developing AI agents, creating benchmarks to evaluate their performance and building guardrails to ensure the systems operate safely and reliably.

"You're taking all the mundane work, and you're trying to get this agent to do it," he said.

Huang further noted that developing these systems requires a different set of skills than conventional software engineering.

"That requires imagination, that requires creativity, a lot of technology," he added.

Huang, who co-founded Nvidia in 1993, has repeatedly outlined a vision in which AI agents become embedded across every department of the company, assisting employees with routine work and improving productivity rather than replacing human expertise.

AI Creating New Jobs

During the interview, Huang pushed back against growing concerns that advances in generative AI will lead to widespread job losses among white-collar professionals.

Instead, he argued that deploying AI at scale is generating demand for entirely new types of work.

"The amount of work that we have to do to bring AI into the world is really quite incredible," he said.

He continued, "So it's creating a whole bunch of jobs. And, my software engineers love this."

His comments contrast with the more cautious outlook expressed by some other technology executives. For example, Dario Amodei has warned that increasingly capable AI systems could significantly reduce demand for some white-collar occupations, while Andy Jassy has acknowledged that AI is likely to change the company's workforce over time by automating certain roles.

Huang has consistently taken a more optimistic view, arguing that AI will reshape jobs rather than simply eliminate them.

In a television interview in May, he said: "This is the part that people don't realize about AI. The first thing that AI is doing right now is creating an enormous number of jobs," adding that "AI creates jobs. AI is the United States's best opportunity to re-industrialize ourselves."

Nvidia remains one of the biggest beneficiaries of the global AI boom, reaching the status of the world's most valuable company with a market capitalization of about $4.7 trillion. The company's graphics processing units (GPUs) power many of the world's leading AI models and agentic AI systems, making Nvidia a central supplier for companies investing heavily in artificial intelligence infrastructure.

However, the evolution of AI has triggered a major shift in the tech industry. As AI coding assistants become increasingly capable of generating routine code, software engineers are expected to spend more time defining problems, designing AI workflows, validating outputs, establishing safety guardrails and integrating autonomous agents into business operations.

In Huang's view, those changes are expanding the role of engineers rather than making them obsolete.