The creator of a popular AI coding agent says software engineering jobs will soon be a thing of the past as artificial intelligence automates code creation.
Boris Cherny, who created Claude Code at Anthropic, said in an interview on Y Combinator’s Lightcone podcast that 2026 will bring “insane” developments in AI. This includes significant changes in the jobs of software engineers across industries.
“Today, I think coding is essentially solved for me, and I think that’s true for everyone, regardless of field,” Charney said in an interview published Tuesday. “I think the title ‘software engineer’ will start to disappear, and I think it will probably become a builder, maybe a product manager. The title will probably remain as a vestige.”
Charney added that software engineers will increasingly take on other tasks beyond just coding, such as “writing specifications” (documents that define what to build and how to build it) and interacting with users.
“This is the same thing we’re starting to see now with our teams. Engineers are very generalists, and every feature on the team is coded,” he said. This includes product managers, designers, engineering managers, and finance personnel.
Technology company executives and founders say advances in AI have rapidly changed the way teams operate in recent years.
Startup founder Jesal Ghadia recently told Business Insider that all of his company’s code is written by agents, which would not have been possible in 2024.
Agents like Claude have changed the way software engineers work, allowing them to spend more time reviewing and debugging code than writing lines of code.
Some people in the industry Unintended consequences of relying on AI. One software engineer told Business Insider that while AI increases productivity, it also makes people overworked, creating “AI fatigue.”
Andrei Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI and former head of AI at Tesla, said in January that he noticed his ability to code by hand was starting to “deflate.”
