At Anthropic, the rise of AI coding tools is already changing the face of hiring.
Co-founder Jack Clark says the value of junior talent within the company is now “a bit questionable”, while the importance of experienced engineers is growing.
“What we’re finding is that there’s an increasing value of older adults who have really well-adjusted intuition and sense,” Clark said on “The Ezra Klein Show” on Tuesday.
Claude, the company’s large-scale language model, is already “comfortably writing the vast majority” of Anthropic’s code, he added.
He said the company could reach 99% of its in-house coding by the end of the year “if things speed up very aggressively.”
As AI takes over coding, humans move up the stack
This change doesn’t mean Anthropic will shrink its engineering layer, as some other technology companies have done with AI.
Clark acknowledged that there are more people with software engineering skills working at Anthropic now than there were two years ago.
As Business Insider’s Alastair Barr recently pointed out, Anthropic’s careers page lists at least 100 software engineer roles the company is hiring for.
But what those engineers do, and what kind of engineers companies prioritize, is changing.
As the clad code takes on more implementation work, bottlenecks move up the stack.
“There are still certain roles where we want to hire young people, but the issues we’re looking at are the really basic tasks that Claude Code and our coding system can do. What we need are people with a lot of experience,” Clark said.
Clark said he thinks of this as “O-ring automation,” where once parts of a workflow are automated, people can rush to those that remain slow or difficult, improve on them, and automate them further.
Clark suggested that this change could have implications beyond anthropology.
“The distribution is changing,” he said. It is not necessarily the number of employees that is changing, but the location of value.
