Nvidia CEO: AI Doomers Could Cause a Software Engineer Shortage

It feels like every week Dario (Anthropic’s CEO) is yelling about how AI is going to destroy white-collar jobs, particularly software engineering jobs. Well, in April 2026, about 4 years into the “in 6 weeks, AI is taking your coding job” cycle, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is finally talking about the potential consequences of that narrative:

“This is one of the concerns that I have about the doomers describing the end of work and killing of jobs.

If we discourage people from being software engineers, we’re going to run out of software engineers. The same prediction happened ten years ago. Some of the doomers were telling people, ‘Whatever you do, don’t be a radiologist.’

You might hear some of those videos still on the web saying radiology is going to be the first career to go and the world is not going to need any more radiologists. Guess what we’re short of? Radiologists.”

– Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, in a recent interview with Dwarkesh Patel.

I just spent a full 8 hours coding with AI yesterday (not that I haven’t done that before, it was just a particularly long session). I was swapping between Opus 4.7 and GPT 5.4, and while I usually do feel somewhere between 25 and 50% more productive, yesterday I was pulling on that stochastic slot machine lever and just never really hit the jackpot. Each agentic turn was taking 15-20 minutes, and I was getting a ton of bloated buggy code that I then had to manually dig into and try to coerce the model into fixing… it was exhausting, slow, and most importantly, unproductive.

We have 5 full-time engineers at Boot.dev, and I still don’t see how AI is even close to being able to replace them.

Maybe it’s a skill issue.

Maybe I’m biased (I am) because a strong coding jobs market is good for my business (Boot.dev).

Sometimes I’ll one-shot a task, but sometimes I’m be led on a wild goose chase when I could have done it myself much faster. Again, on average, I’m seeing low double-digit productivity gains. My suspicion is that for some companies, that’s enough to lay off some internal tooling engineers. But for companies where development is a profit center and not a cost center, the cost of software engineering going down by ~20% should increase demand for engineers, not decrease it.

Now, many features and bug fixes that “weren’t worth it” all of a sudden are.

Jevons paradox at work? We’ll see.