DoorDash CEO says AI coding alone won’t boost engineer productivity

DoorDash co‑founder and chief executive Tony Xu (徐迅) told a podcast that AI‑generated code now makes up roughly two‑thirds of the company’s code, but this only improves a limited part of an engineer’s day. He said engineers spend the majority of their time on product reviews, design meetings and aligning with business teams, tasks that also need AI support. Xu added that without broader workflow integration—beyond code generation—companies cannot achieve the productivity gains expected from AI. He noted DoorDash is still exploring AI for physical operations such as food‑preparation robots and autonomous delivery vehicles, and that AI has not yet altered the firm’s organizational structure. Industry peers, including former Tesla AI head Andrej Karpathy, have warned that AI‑generated code can be messy and overhyped.