By Katherine Li
Publication Date: 2026-10-02 04:02:00
The former Google CEO said AI has beaten him at the thing he was once best at.
Eric Schmidt, now 71, told Blackstone’s “Inside Blackstone” podcast that he was among the top programmers of his generation, but today’s AI coding tools are writing the code he couldn’t.
“I was a very, very good programmer when I was 22, right? I was one of the best, according to myself. My field is over, right?” Schmidt told podcast host Christine Anderson. “I look at the code it writes now. I can’t write that code. I couldn’t when I was 22, right? So, I got beaten, right? Hard.”
Still, Schmidt tells young people to learn to code so they can give the most accurate orders to AI tools and be the brains of the design.
“I had to build the house,” Schmidt said in an analogy. “Now I can architect the house using the equivalent of Claude Code or OpenAI Codex or future products from Google, which they’re working on, all of which allow me to say what I want and the code gets…
