Automating Senior Software Engineers Will Take Longer Than OpenAI Says

OpenAI’s development of an “agent” to automate the work of a senior software engineer—which my colleagues scooped yesterday—will raise the stakes in an already competitive market for AI coding tools. But OpenAI still has to overcome a major data problem before such a product can become widely available.

While the internet is full of coding examples for training models, there is a dearth of information on how senior engineers turn a broad idea from managers—say, rewriting how an app collects user data—into a completed project, according to people we’re talking to.