Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev estimates that “a minority” of the company’s new code is written by humans.
On the 20VC podcast, Tenev said that it’s become difficult to distinguish human-written from AI-generated code.
He said the company has used tools like GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and Windsurf, and nearly 100% of his engineers use an AI editor.
At Robinhood, nearly all of the engineers are vibe coders.
That’s according to Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev, who said on the 20VC podcast that the company’s human-written code was hard to distinguish from AI-generated code. Among the company’s engineers, “close to 100%” are using AI code editors, he said.
When asked what percentage of Robinhood’s new code is AI-generated, Tenev said that it was around 50%. That’s a higher percentage than what Microsoft and Google have previously said, with CEOs Satya Nadella and Sundar Pichai estimating around 30%.
Tenev acknowledged that the 50% metric was imprecise, thanks to the upgrowth of “agentic” code editors.
“We’ve moved from GitHub Copilot, which is an autocomplete system, to Cursor, and now things like Windsurf, where nearly all of the code is written by AI,” Tenev said. “It’s hard to even determine what the human-generated code is.”
Taking a guess, Tenev estimated the “minority” of new code at Robinhood was written by humans.
Robinhood’s stock price has been on a tear, trading up over 177% since the start of the year, with multiple factors driving its recent rally. Robinhood expanded its crypto venture by launching US private-stock tokens. Retail investors on Robinhood remain active, and the company continues to roll out new products like a predictions-market hub.
On 20VC, Tenev said AI had contributed to the company’s cost and efficiency stabilization, he said.
“We have been pretty mum on how much we’ve been using it internally,” Tenev said. “The impact that it’s had on internal teams, ranging from software engineering to customer support, the really big internal teams, has been huge.”
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