Bjarne Stroustrup
Creator of C++
The Danish computer scientist who created C++, the language underneath game engines, browsers, and AI frameworks themselves. In 2025 interviews he voiced “serious concerns” about AI coding — stale averaged solutions, unverifiable output, and developers losing the ability to spot problems.
In his words
Yes, I do have serious concerns. I’m not saying it won’t help, but it does have a tendency of guiding people towards things which everybody used to do. It’s not a good way forward. Furthermore, I fear that people lose the ability to detect problems because they are so used to having it done for them.
They generate more bugs, more security holes. They have bloated code, which pessimizes — because you use more memory — and it’s hard to validate.
Biography
Bjarne Stroustrup (born 1950 in Aarhus, Denmark) created C++ at Bell Labs, starting with “C with Classes” in 1979 and shipping the first commercial release in 1985. Four decades on, C++ runs the performance-critical layer of the modern world — game engines, browsers, operating systems, trading platforms, and, with some irony, the numerical backends of the very machine-learning frameworks now generating code. After Bell Labs he taught at Texas A&M and is a professor of computer science at Columbia University.
Serious concerns about AI-written code
Asked at the Qt World Summit in May 2025 whether he worried about AI’s impact on C++ development, Stroustrup did not hedge: “Yes, I do have serious concerns.” His critique is twofold. First, models trained on yesterday’s code steer programmers toward “things which everybody used to do” — an averaging effect he calls “not a good way forward” for a field that advances by breaking with stale practice. Second, he fears skill atrophy: developers who lean on assistants stop exercising the judgment needed to catch subtle problems.
In podcast interviews the same year he went further on the engineering specifics. AI-generated code, he argued, brings “more bugs, more security holes” and bloat that is “hard to validate” — a serious problem in regulated domains where every change must be audited. A human’s change is localized and reviewable; regenerate code from a slightly different prompt and “you have to check it again — all of the code that was generated.” In his own specialty, programming-language design, he said attempts at AI-generated code “have not been successful.”
Stroustrup is a skeptic rather than a crusader: he allows that AI “won’t hurt” in some uses and concedes it may help. But coming from the man whose language underpins the AI stack itself — and who has spent forty years thinking about how code stays correct at scale — his warnings about validation and skill decay carry unusual technical weight. His stance echoes fellow language creators like Rich Hickey, though others such as Linus Torvalds have landed firmly on the opposite side.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/bjarne-stroustrup