Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang aims for engineers to code zero percent, leveraging AI assistants like Cursor to tackle complex, undiscovered problems. He believes this ‘Purpose vs Task’ approach, akin to radiology’s evolution, will elevate human roles. While some, like Cursor’s CEO, caution against unchecked AI development, Huang remains confident in this human-centric future for innovation.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang wants his engineers to spend exactly zero percent of their time writing code. In a recent appearance on the No Priors AI podcast, Huang revealed that every engineer at the $3 trillion chipmaker now uses Cursor, an AI coding assistant, throughout their workday. His goal? Free them entirely from what he calls ‘syntax’ so they can focus on finding and solving problems that haven’t been cracked yet.“Nothing would give me more joy than if none of our engineers were coding at all,” Huang said. “And they were just purely solving undiscovered problems.”

This isn’t just philosophical musing. Huang has been pushing a framework he calls ‘Purpose vs Task’ across multiple interviews in recent months, including a viral appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience. The idea is simple: coding is the task, but discovering and solving novel problems is the purpose. AI should handle the former so humans can concentrate on the latter.

Why radiologists didn’t disappear, and why engineers might not either

Huang points to radiology as proof this approach creates jobs rather than eliminates them. Years ago, AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton predicted radiologists would be obsolete within five years because computers could scan images faster than humans. Instead, radiologist numbers have grown. The reason, Huang argues, is that reading scans was always just a task—the real purpose is diagnosing disease and improving patient outcomes. When AI took over the grunt work, demand for the human expertise behind it actually expanded.At Nvidia’s recent all-hands meeting, Huang reportedly pushed back hard against managers who were telling teams to dial back AI usage. “Are you insane?” he said, according to Business Insider. He promised employees they’d still have work to do—just more ambitious work.

Vibe coding pioneers warn Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s approach has limits

Not everyone shares Huang’s unbridled optimism. Michael Truell, CEO of Cursor itself—the $29 billion startup whose AI tool Nvidia has embraced—recently cautioned against ‘vibe coding,’ where developers let AI build software without reviewing the output. “If you close your eyes and don’t look at the code and have AIs build things with shaky foundations, things start to kind of crumble,” Truell told Fortune’s Brainstorm AI conference.Even Andrej Karpathy, the former Tesla AI director who coined the term ‘vibe coding,’ admitted his recent Nanochat project was “basically entirely hand-written” because AI agents “just didn’t work well enough.” He recently warned fellow programmers: “I’ve never felt this much behind. The profession is being dramatically refactored.”For now, Huang’s betting big that humans who focus on purpose rather than tasks will come out ahead. Whether that bet pays off for the millions of developers who actually write code for a living remains the undiscovered problem.