For decades, a Big Tech career in software engineering promised a stable job and a six-figure starting salary. Now, that job title could be gone by the end of this year, according to the man who created the artificial intelligence (AI) tool that is sending convulsions through the Valley.
Claude Code, which was released a year ago, has been widely adopted by software engineers and revolutionized how they approach their work. The tool is more sophisticated than traditional vibe coding with a chatbot. Rather it’s agentic, meaning it can autonomously execute tasks with minimal human intervention. One senior Google engineer said it recreated a year’s worth of work in an hour. Its creator, Boris Cherny, sees an inevitable change coming for coders.
“I think by the end of the year, everyone is going to be a product manager, and everyone codes. The title software engineer is going to start to go away,” Cherny said recently on an episode of Lenny’s Podcast, hosted by Lenny Rachitsky. “It’s just going to be replaced by ‘builder,’ and it’s going to be painful for a lot of people.”
Cherny knows this in part because Claude Code has written 100% of his code for months. Originally designed as a side project, Cherny developed Claude Code while working in Anthropic’s Bell Labs-style experimental division. The tool was quickly adopted by engineers internally, before it was released to the public.
“I have not edited a single line by hand since November,” he said, explaining that he still checks the code. “I don’t think we’re at the point where you can be totally hands-off, especially when there’s a lot of people running the program. You have to make sure that it’s correct, you have to make sure it’s safe.”
Cherny predicts that many other companies and coders will have Claude write all of their code by the end of this year, too. Earlier this month, Anthropic released Cowork, a more user-friendly version of the coding product for non-coders that can take autonomous action. The technology is particularly adept at daily management and organization tasks, and Cherny told Fortune last month that he uses it to automatically message team members on Slack when they haven’t updated shared spreadsheets.
Claude Code could be next printing press, Cherny says
With Claude Code, Cherny says that engineers still have to understand the underlying principles, but “in a year or two, it’s not going to matter.”
He compared software engineering and AI adoption to scribes and the printing press. Before printing, scribes were the people who read and wrote and were only a small percentage of the population, he explained. As more people learned to read and write, scribes spent less time copying books by hand, which allowed them to spend time doing things they were more interested in, like bookbinding or drawing art in books, he said, citing an unnamed “historical document” of an interview with a scribe.
The printing press metaphor was beloved in a recent era of tech disruption by another Silicon Valley figure: Mark Zuckerberg, who likened social media’s disruption of other media to the creation of print.
Zuckerberg has repeatedly returned to this metaphor through the years, while media theorists and historians have noted that the printing press was a major development in undermining religious and political authorities while also giving rise to a new era of propaganda and “fake news.” The Protestant Reformation and the long-term decline of the Catholic Church was a famous byproduct. Arguably, the world is still digesting the after-shocks of the social media revolution before a new printing press-like invention is upon us.
A self-described “prolific coder,” Cherny said Claude has freed up a lot of time for him to focus on the parts of his job he enjoys most.
“This is how I feel where I don’t have to do the tedious work anymore of coding,” he said. “The fun part is figuring out what to build, and coming up with this. It’s talking to users. It’s thinking about these big systems. It’s thinking about the future. It’s collaborating with other people on the team, and that’s what I get to do more of now.”
A shift for all computer-based jobs
Cherny predicted that AI will expand “to pretty much any kind of work that you can do on a computer,” with tools like Cowork.
“When I think back to engineering a year ago, no one really knew what an agent was, no one really used it,” he said. “But nowadays it’s just the way that we do our work,” he said.
The same shift is happening with semi and non-technical jobs now that Claude can interact with Google Docs, email, and Slack, he said. When asked about how to succeed during this moment of disruption, Cherny offered some advice.
“Experiment with the tools, get to know them, don’t be scared of them. Just dive in, try them, be on the bleeding edge, be on the frontier,” he said.
He also recommends that people across all fields become more generalists. Everyone, from the product manager to the finance guy, on Claude Code’s team code, he explained, and the strongest engineers also have an aptitude for design, infrastructure, or business.
“I think a lot of the people that will be rewarded the most over the next few years, they won’t just be AI native, and they don’t just know how to use these tools really well, but also they’re curious and they’re generalists, and they cross over multiple disciplines and can think about the broader problem they’re solving rather than just the engineering part of it, he said.
With the scale of potential job disruption AI agents could cause, Cherny repeated a common refrain used by Anthropic leaders. He said that the future implications of the technology “shouldn’t be up to us,” and that society needs to have a larger conversation about the future of work.
Anthropic takes the disruption “very, very seriously,” Cherny added, and employs economists and policy and social impact experts to assess the technology.
Still, AI companies like Anthropic have not indicated that they plan to slow the pace of rapidly changing technology as they plan an initial public offering this year.
“I do think in the meantime, it’s going to be very disruptive, and it’s going to be painful for a lot of people,” Cherny said.
