Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson says artificial intelligence (AI) has destroyed the value of developer counts. Blockchains have leaned on the figure for years to prove they are growing.
He spoke on Sunday in defense of Midnight, a privacy-focused blockchain built on Cardano. Its foundation recently cut part of the team that recruits outside coders and shifted focus toward what Hoskinson calls builders.
Why Developer Counts Stopped Working
For a decade, blockchains ranked themselves by how many engineers wrote code for them. A human coder was scarce, so the tally meant something.
AI coding assistants removed that scarcity. Anyone can now ship working software without understanding it, Hoskinson argues.
“You can have people who have no technical knowledge and no experience use these tools to look like a developer. So it’s no longer a scarce and finite resource,” he said in a broadcast on Sunday.
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The practical problem is verification. Code bounties and hackathons now invite entrants to pass off AI output as their own work.
Teams then burn time interrogating authorship rather than attracting projects. Hoskinson wants ventures with paying users and outside investors instead.
BeInCrypto reported in June that he was rebuilding Midnight City development strategy around AI agents.
Midnight Still Funds the Metric It Dismisses
The contradiction sits inside his own ecosystem. The Midnight Foundation is running three hackathons with prize pools worth $26,500. A Korea contest opened on September 1.
Those programs reward the code output Hoskinson says can no longer be trusted. He conceded the split, saying he sees things differently than the foundation does.
He has broken with Cardano institutions before, having stepped away from ADA promotion in June.
Cardano (ADA) trades near $0.21, up 0.8% over 24 hours and unmoved by the strategy shift. Whether builders arrive faster than developers leave is what the next two quarters will settle.
Bitrue