The Neuron: AI Explained
How 48% of Non-Engineers Are Shipping Production Software (with Retool CEO David Hsu)
17 Nov 2025
Retool CEO David Hsu reveals that 48% of non-engineers are now shipping software. We explore how AI is democratizing software development, why engineers might stop coding internal apps within 18-24 months, and what this means for the future of work. David shares insights from Retool's survey of 10,000+ companies, Retool’s new AppGen program, and how "tomorrow's developers" are using AI to build real production applications on enterprise data.Subscribe to The Neuron newsletter: https://theneuron.aiLearn more about Retool: https://retool.com
Full Episode
It's a little scary. I really think the era of engineers, hands-on keyboard coding applications is so clearly over. You are almost the API, if that makes sense. It's like you are doing the grunt work of schlepping the data back and forth. Could there be a world where half of us are unemployed, actually, because our job has been automated by AI?
I think probably the next 18, 24 months of these non-engineers building these automations of software that will lead us there.
Welcome, humans, to the latest episode of the Neuron Podcast. I'm Corey Knowles, joined as always by Grant Harvey. And today we have David Hsu, CEO of Retool, a platform trusted by more than 10,000 companies to build internal software kind of like Lego blocks. David, welcome to the Neuron. Thanks, Corey. So excited to be here.
David, for those who haven't heard of Retool, can you give us the 30-second elevator pitch real quick? What does Retool do? Yeah.
So Retool is an enterprise AppGen platform. The idea is that we allow tomorrow's developers, which I'll explain in a second, to go build production software on top of their data. That's awesome.
That's awesome. And you just released a survey related to this, the really fascinating findings. So basically, in the survey, you found that 48% of non-engineers are already shipping production software. Corey, you can take it from here.
So does this mean, like, Karen from accounting can now ship software? Like, who are these people? What types of companies are they working for? I realize that's a laundry list of questions, but, like, what's driving it and who is it?
Yeah, so it is actually some people from accounting. I would say that what we've noticed over the last few years here at Retool is the number of non-engineers using our platform to build software has steadily increased and actually really sharply increased over the last few months. But if you look back, I think, four to five years, actually, Retool was entirely built for engineers.
It was a platform that you kind of needed to know how to code in order to use it. You needed to know how to write SQL. You needed to know JavaScript in order to go use the platform. And I think over the past five, six years, there's been a trend towards people becoming a bit more technical.
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