“Engineers don’t write code anymore” — Anthropic CEO says AI is about to eat the entire profession

The Anthropic AI logo is displayed on a mobile phone with a visual digital reflected background in this photo illustration in Brussels, Belgium, on December 7, 2025. (Photo by Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
(Image credit: Getty Images | Nurphoto)

I'm pretty sure that "coding is dead" with the prevalence of AI is starting to sound like a broken record by now. In 2024, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang indicated that coding already be dead in the water with the rapid advances in AI. He further indicated that it might not be a viable career option for the next generation, recommending biology, education, manufacturing, or farming as viable alternatives.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff seemingly echoed similar sentiments last year, when he indicated that the company was "seriously debating" hiring software engineers while citing incredible productivity gains from agentic AIs. Even Meta's Mark Zuckerberg claimed that mid-level AI engineers might claim coding jobs from professionals in 2025.

According to the executive:

"The mechanism whereby I imagined it would happen, is that we would make models that were good at coding and good at AI research, and we would use that to produce the next generational model and speed it up to create a loop that would increase the speed of model development"

I have engineers within Anthropic who say I don't write any code anymore. I just let the model write the code, I edit it, I do the things around it. I think, I don't know, we might be 6 to 12 months away from when the model is doing most, maybe all of what SWEs do end-to-end. And then it's a question of how fast does that loop close.

Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei

However, the executive admitted that the loop can't be entirely closed using AI. He listed chips, manufacturing of chips, and the time for model training as some of the major deterrents preventing AI from speeding and closing this loop. "I think there's a lot of uncertainty, and it's easy to see how this could take a few years," added Amodei.

Interestingly, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis says AI can already assist with coding and some aspects of research. "The full closing of the loop, though, I think, is an unknown," added Hassabis. "I think it is possible to do, you may need AGI itself to be able to do that in some domains."

Elsewhere, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was shocked by the high degree of trust people have in ChatGPT despite its propensity to hallucinate. "It should be the tech that you don't trust that much," Altman added.

In a bizarre incident highlighted last year, Replit's AI coder deleted a company's database without permission, then hid and lied about it. To that end, it seems like there's still a lot of work to be done before AI can completely wipe software engineers and coders off the map.

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Will AI eventually automate software development, leaving professionals without jobs? Share your thoughts in the comments and cast your vote in the poll!


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Kevin Okemwa
Contributor

Kevin Okemwa is a seasoned tech journalist based in Nairobi, Kenya with lots of experience covering the latest trends and developments in the industry at Windows Central. With a passion for innovation and a keen eye for detail, he has written for leading publications such as OnMSFT, MakeUseOf, and Windows Report, providing insightful analysis and breaking news on everything revolving around the Microsoft ecosystem. While AFK and not busy following the ever-emerging trends in tech, you can find him exploring the world or listening to music.

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