AI coding tools look more and more like the canary in the coal mine for an agentic revolution of all forms of knowledge work.

It’s clear that AI coding tools have largely shifted the jobs of software engineers. The capabilities of tools like Claude Code, OpenAI’s Codex, Cursor and more have alleviated the burden of writing code by hand. As such, developers are becoming “product engineers,” rather than software engineers, Kari Briski, VP of generative AI software at Nvidia, told The Deep View. “You're more of an architect now, rather than just a typer.”

These tools have shifted the tide so much that practically anyone can code, from complete novices to hardcore engineers. One tech executive told us how her 12-year-old daughter is using Replit to build an app to track her sports performance and provide tips to improve her technique.

But in a panel on Wednesday at Nvidia GTC, CEO Jensen Huang told an audience of hundreds of attendees in San Jose on Wednesday that “almost all work can be specified as code.” And the panelists, all members of the company’s newly-launched Nemotron Coalition, agreed that coding may just be the guinea pig for sweeping automation.

• Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity, said that a model that was trained originally to be stellar at coding “is suddenly able to do all kinds of knowledge work.”
• Michael Truell, CEO of Cursor, meanwhile, said that last year’s “economy-wide story” was the widespread adoption of coding agents. “This year [it's] going to be [about how] what started working in coding last year is going to work in all of these other domains.”
• Misha Laskin, CEO of ReflectionAI, noted that coding and enterprise automation are just the “first generation” of problems that we can solve, but because these models are “mechanical brains with endless capacity to learn,” we’ll get to a point where solving fundamental problems becomes a matter of allocating economic resources, rather than scientific barriers.

The power that these coding tools represent has led to a fierce battle over the hearts and minds of AI builders. And a clear winner is emerging: At GTC this week, we did a straw poll among the people we met from across the AI ecosystem, asking them which AI coding tools they use. Remarkably, almost everyone we talked to now uses one, regardless of their level of technical expertise. Overwhelmingly, Claude Code was the most-used tool, mentioned by more than three-fourths of the people. Next was Codex and Cursor. Several people use multiple tools, and among those, most of them use Claude Code and another tool.

Our Deeper View

The fight to come out on top in AI coding is about more than just speeding up the developer workflow. If AI coding tools are a gateway to a larger transformation of knowledge work, then whoever wins over software engineers may win over white-collar industries broadly. According to Ramp data from March, Anthropic already has a massive lead among enterprises, capturing more than 73% of enterprise spending among first-time AI buyers. And with its existing popularity among developers, the company may have an edge in what could be a major metamorphosis of the way we work in the months and years ahead.