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Chollet says agents haven't cut engineers; he cites no data

François Chollet, creator of Keras and co-founder of ARC-AGI, says agents now write almost all code, yet engineers are more numerous and busier than in 2025 and employers' P&L usually hasn't moved; Box CEO Aaron Levie responds that software demand isn't fixed and engineering's weight in the economy is rising. Chollet's explanation is systems thinking: automating one step creates new friction and moves the bottleneck elsewhere (François Chollet, 2026-10-16). Levie quoted that post and rejected its premise that software demand is fixed and that automation therefore reduces labor demand. Levie's reasoning is that agents can use tools, operate computers and write software on the fly, so problems that couldn't be digitized before can now be solved with software (Aaron Levie, 2026-10-16). Neither attached data, and the pairing is SecondSource's; both agree demand for engineers is growing. Box sells an enterprise content platform for agents to use, so "everything becomes software" aligns with Box's business interest.

Concept illustration: on a pale peach background, a hand with a dark sleeve and white cuff reaches in from the bottom right and holds up a cutaway two-storey house on its palm, with a large black quotation mark at top right and, in a small ground-floor room on the right, a desk with a large open book, a chair, a closed door and a window. Upstairs, four screens showing speech bubbles sit on a long table and send long strips of paper down into a funnel in the floor, which drops sheets onto a large heap in the wide ground-floor room, where many black-silhouetted figures carry stacks of paper and one pushes a cart loaded with paper, under hanging lamps and beside windows and a doorway.

Two other industry figures gave numbers. One is a recollection and one is relayed, and the populations differ, so they can be read side by side but not compared. Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney recalls that writing Unreal Engine 1 was about 70% typing and refactoring and 30% hard problems; Sweeney says the surprise is that AI is starting to solve the 30% (Tim Sweeney, 2026-10-17). Harry Stebbings of the venture firm 20VC relays LangChain CEO Harrison Chase: LangChain's spending on coding tools is about 30% of engineering payroll, and that share has fallen over the past two months while token usage rose, thanks to caching, routing and the execution harness LangChain controls (Harry Stebbings, 2026-10-16). The 30% is one company's self-report, relayed, and whether the denominator grew with hiring isn't stated. How we checked →

Source and checks

This item ran in the brief of Oct 18, 2026, alongside 14 other items. How we checked it, the quote checks and what was still missing that day are on that issue's How we checked page.

Cite this item

SecondSource (2026). "Chollet says agents haven't cut engineers; he cites no data." https://secondsource.io/en/expert/2026-10-18-1/. Accessed access date.