Robinhood CEO Says Majority of Company's New Code Written by AI (businessinsider.com) 43
Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev has said that the majority of his company's new code is written by AI, with "close to 100%" of engineers using AI code editors. Speaking on the 20VC podcast, Tenev estimated around 50% of new code at the trading platform is AI-generated.
Tenev said the 50% figure is imprecise due to advanced "agentic" code editors that have made it difficult to distinguish human-written from AI-generated code. The company has progressed from GitHub Copilot to Cursor and now Windsurf, where "nearly all of the code is written by AI," he said. Tenev estimated only a "minority" of new code at Robinhood is written by humans.
Tenev said the 50% figure is imprecise due to advanced "agentic" code editors that have made it difficult to distinguish human-written from AI-generated code. The company has progressed from GitHub Copilot to Cursor and now Windsurf, where "nearly all of the code is written by AI," he said. Tenev estimated only a "minority" of new code at Robinhood is written by humans.
Hacker's paradise? (Score:5, Interesting)
Gotta wonder how many extra security vulnerabilities there will be in their trading infrastructure.
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The Lady Marian backdoor.
She is not amused.
Re: Hacker's paradise? (Score:2)
Yep. Someone's going to fuck them hard from behind one day.
Re:Hacker's paradise? (Score:4, Interesting)
Likely a lot, because them doing it cheaper means they are not doing the code review that AI code needs. Also expect unreliability, outages, corrupted trades and other crap.
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Indeed. And that has been known for a long time. These "AI coders" seem really intent on repeating history.
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Oh I dont know. My workmates think I'm a goddamn horrible monster in code reviews.
That said, in 30 years in the job, you get a nose for that sort of things, cos god knows if theres something stupid you can do in code, chances are I've already done it and learned the hard way.
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That said, in 30 years in the job, you get a nose for that sort of things
AI will mistakes that are different than the normal human mistakes, so you need to turn up your attention and look for things you're not expecting.
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That and a human, even in error, at least knows what he meant to do when writing code. When AI spits out code, it isn't a given that anyone understands what it does, much less what it is meant to do.
Re: Hacker's paradise? (Score:1)
There was the article before about AI automatically adding imports to stuff that is a Trojan horse. I think that will become more common over time until it starts to explode in the faces of various companies.
From what I see, even code that requires a lot of editing is retarded as AI code as well
Metrics drive behaviors (Score:2)
When the boss starts tracking your AI use, your behavior will change.
Expect major IT incidents in their future then (Score:5, Interesting)
Because that is an extreme risk. Having "AI" write code is only cheaper if you do not have competent people do careful review of that code. As soon as you have competent people do careful review, it becomes much more expensive, as reviewing code above a certain low complexity threshold is much harder than writing good code in the first place. AND AI code is harder to review on top of that because everything looks good, even when it is not.
I call bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)
I recently used an agentic AI to push through an undocumented USB stack (I'm talking to you TinyUSB) while trying to implement a proprietary and poorly documented protocol as a custom driver. The AI was able to apply some reversed engineered logic I assume it learned from scraping open source projects.
The whole time I had to treat it like a hostile four-year-old brushing their teeth. "Brush up, now down, no you're not done yet, up again, then down, now move to the next set." And then I had to rewrite everything since it was 200% the size it needed to be. It did save me some time, but 50% sounds like an ass fact (a fact pulled from your ass). Oh wait, they probably left the bloat in, which exactly aligns with how my code would look if I didn't rewrite the whole thing to be maintainable.
Um, I meant I'm calling bullshit on anyone still claiming AI generated code will be full of security vulnerabilities. This is absolutely not the case if the AI is driven by someone competent. The old rules still apply - you get what you pay for. If the engineer is good, the code will be good no matter the tools.
Re: I call bullshit (Score:2)
"This is absolutely not the case if the AI is driven by someone competent."
That's the point, they are claiming to be saving both time and money. That means they're using incompetents, not reviewing the code properly, or both. Or just lying of course. No guesses which from me, any of these are plausible.
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Not "by AI", it really "with AI assistance" (Score:5, Insightful)
The reality is 'with "close to 100%" of engineers using AI code editors'. So it's really "with AI assistance" not "by AI". Thank you AI editor for the code completion suggestions.
Maybe it offered a lint-like warning that some thingee was not deallocated. Thanks again.
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Our executives pulled this trick recently. They created a survey that was engineered so it could be interpreted to say a large amount of code is AI generated. Basically they took the numbers of like "how many times a day do you use Copilot" and turned that into n% of code is AI generated. Never did they ask how much of the code we write is AI generated. We have a pretty good system with Copilot, and it can contextualize a good amount of code, but the only thing it replaces is Google search/StackOverflow. It
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Tenev said the 50% figure is imprecise due to advanced "agentic" code editors that have made it difficult to distinguish human-written from AI-generated code. Tenev estimated only a "minority" of new code at Robinhood is written by humans.
You just got to trust him on all of this. A CEO would never lie.
He’s also working with the Trump White House...
Oh, can't trust a word out of his mouth.
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Its really programmers using an AI tool and auto-complete in an editor is a tool as well.
So soon we will have to draw a line: when is AI writing code and when is it a tool? will it always be a tool? if one single prompt writes an entire bug free project, is that AI writing code 100%?
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"if one single prompt writes an entire bug free project, is that AI writing code 100%?"
that's not the right question. A prompt may be broken down into a series of prompts, a prompt itself isn't really important. We can say that "AI" generates 100% of the output for its prompt, as long as we define what prompt and output are (and AI I suppose).
The answer is who knows, and who cares. Anyone claiming these things is doing so for non-technical reasons. What's important is (a) what's being done, (b) how it's
On a good day ... AI can glue a few algos together (Score:2)
On a really good day, AI can notice that a particular problem can be solved by glueing together a few such well known and well documented algorithms. Not that it reasoned this or anything, its training probably included disc
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They added an AI button to Gmail (we use web gmail for work) and let me tell you that our email communications are not 100% written 'with AI assistance'. But the button is there 100% of time, so our CEO would happily tell investors that they are.
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They added an AI button to Gmail (we use web gmail for work) and let me tell you that our email communications are not 100% written 'with AI assistance'. But the button is there 100% of time, so our CEO would happily tell investors that they are.
I'd use it for spelling and grammar check. :-)
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>> Thank you AI editor for the code completion suggestions.
I use it every day. Its way more than that, he isn't "misrepresenting reality".
You can work up some very good incremental development with nothing but prompts, the AI will write all the code for you. If you don't quite like what it did or want improvements you can just tell it. On new projects I generally start small and build new features as I get things working. In the past I had to write all the code, now I just describe what I woul
AI the ultimate cut and paste coder? (Score:2)
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Yep. The CEO's definition of "the code was written by AI" is apparently just "the author of the code used an IDE that has AI available."
Someone should ask the CEO whether their email client has AI available.
If yes, then "okay so AI writes all of your email now, I see, thanks."
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So it's really "with AI assistance" not "by AI".
You don't know that though. You're just applying the thought of how you as an engineer would use AI, to someone else's work. Not everyone is the same. Some people take zero pride in their work and will shortcut it anyway possible.
Another "trust me, bro" benchmark? (Score:5, Interesting)
Meanwhile, I just had Claude 4.0 try to write some simple refactors earlier today and it randomly inserts semi-colons in the middle of Java method calls and it still can't match braces. I can't rely on it to do basic refactors and ChatGPT and Copilot seem a lot worse.
So does Robinhood.com have a new proprietary AI? Does he have infinitely better tools than are available to the rest of us?
I don't know what to believe anymore. It seems like every CEO is doing the AI song and dance and cheering it on...but I can't see an example of a good AI application or any major service built on AI...just various toolkits that promise glory someday...and various CEOs using it to justify layoffs.
I logically assume it has to do some things well....but are both Amazon and Apple pulling back their releases? Why are the vendors selling general AI platforms? If this can write the vast majority of Robinhood's code, why aren't the vendors offering more specialized services?...how about I pay you a few thousand a month and your magic AI guarantees my company's codebase is perpetually security patched?....or some service that will go through my legacy code and port it to a new language? How much money could you make porting COBOL to Java or Rust?...or VB to C#?...or it doesn't even have to be a legacy language...why not Python to RUST?...why not a JVM, CLR, node.js or Python runtime that converts your regular code to amazing assembly language or highly optimized code?...seems like a license to print money.
I want to believe...I just keep hearing promises of "someday"...and honestly just don't know what to think. This is all a scam seems too simplistic...but....why can't I see more concrete proof?
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I think where we are is a weird culmination of sales-speak along with minor practical advances leaving us with a weird perception by the C-suites that AI is taking over, while in reality the real work is still being done by humans.
Our company has executives going to AI summits that preach AI in everything, all the time, for every reason. These people usually work for AI companies, and desperately want AI to have access to current codebases so that they can get more training data from stable, long-term codeb
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how about I pay you a few thousand a month and your magic AI guarantees my company's codebase is perpetually security patched?
I think their ask would be more like a few hundred thousand, or a few million. The bros have been especially comparing the prices of their services to the prices of salaries. They need to box people into this paradigm of comparing AI to humans. Probably the obsession over the word "agentic" has something to do with this as well.
Framing the loss of talent as "increasing your AI headcount" serves a psychological purpose, making the C-suite less nervous about cutting off chunks of their company. Or at least pr
Old McDonald (Score:3)
Even if it's correct code (Score:1)
it's still just the 2025 version of a 1960s-era IBM, DEC, Honeywell, HP, DG, and Wang* saying majority of our new code is written by compilers where code = stuff the computer that will run the code understands.
Today's AI-generated source code is 60-years-ago's compiler output. Compilers have bugs, and so does AI.
* and Amdahl, NEC, and NCR [genius.com] too
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are you saying that it's not different until AI emits machine code directly?
Why stop there, let's eliminate instruction sets and have AI schedule execution units on demand. It's still just a the same old Turing machine!
Previously 100% of code was written by IDEs (Score:2)
The C-Suite is filled with ignorant people who have made a career out taking credit for other people's work.
Now they want to pretend that the "AI is writing the code" just because a developer is making use of it.
All AI is doing is giving CEOs an excuse to called yet another group of workers, "unskilled."
CEO Marketing. Selling a dream. (Score:2)
What do CEOs do? They don't do any actual work. They are the face of a company and the ultimate marketing representative. Their job is to smile, talk and do anything it takes to excite potential investors and bring more money into the house. Usually, what they say have nothing to do with the actual state of the company because they are either too immersed in their own self delusion or just too disconnected from the ground floor.
It's no different this time. Robinhood CEO is just selling a dream to potential
AI - Actual Indian (Score:2)
I wonder how many of those AI agents are just outsourced contractors based in India like it was discovered to be the case with some big AI company a few weeks ago.
where did all the old code go? (Score:2)
You can't get to 100% without removing code that doesn't comply with a metric, in this case human-written code? Why was all the existing code removed? It wasn't, of course, it's just a lie.
Should investors be impressed if the story their being given is either (a) an obvious lie, or (b) the company clearly doesn't know how to responsibly manage its code?
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Re: where did all the old code go? (Score:2)