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 written.”

“The next generation of people like me will be the architects, and they’ll be very, very smart and they know how to say, ‘this is what I want,'” Schmidt added.

The shift is already underway inside AI companies. At Daytona, a 30-person AI startup, CEO Ivan Burazin previously told Business Insider that each of the 16 engineers manages an average of five AI agents, and no one there writes code anymore.

Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao also said on the “Invest Like the Best” podcast that AI now handles much of the execution layer of knowledge work, including producing some of the company’s financial statements, freeing up humans for oversight and strategy.

“90 plus percent of our code is actually written by Claude Code,” Rao said. “Everyone kind of becomes a manager.”