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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Claude Code<\/a>, which was released a year ago, has been widely adopted <\/a>by software engineers and revolutionized how they approach their work. The tool is more sophisticated than traditional vibe coding with a chatbot. Rather it\u2019s agentic, meaning it can autonomously execute tasks with minimal human intervention. One senior Google<\/a> engineer said<\/a> it re-created a year\u2019s worth of work in an hour. Its creator, Boris Cherny, sees an inevitable change coming for coders.<\/p>\n \u201cI 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,\u201d Cherny said recently on an episode<\/a> of Lenny\u2019s Podcast, hosted by Lenny Rachitsky. \u201cIt\u2019s just going to be replaced by \u2018builder,\u2019 and it\u2019s going to be painful for a lot of people.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s Bell Labs\u2013style experimental division. The tool was quickly adopted by engineers internally before it was released to the public.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI have not edited a single line by hand since November,\u201d he said, explaining that he still checks the code. \u201cI don\u2019t think we\u2019re at the point where you can be totally hands-off, especially when there\u2019s a lot of people running the program. You have to make sure that it\u2019s correct. You have to make sure it\u2019s safe.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n 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\u2019t updated shared spreadsheets.<\/p>\n Claude Code could be the next printing press, Cherny says<\/p>\n With Claude Code, Cherny says that engineers still have to understand the underlying principles, but \u201cin a year or two, it\u2019s not going to matter.\u201d<\/p>\n 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 \u201chistorical document\u201d of an interview with a scribe.\u00a0<\/p>\n The printing press metaphor was beloved in a recent era of tech disruption by another Silicon Valley figure: Mark Zuckerberg<\/a>, who likened social media\u2019s disruption of other media to the creation of print.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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 \u201cfake news.\u201d The Protestant Reformation<\/a> and the long-term decline of the Catholic Church was a famous byproduct. Arguably, the world is still digesting the aftershocks of the social media revolution before a new printing-press-like invention is upon us.<\/p>\n A self-described \u201cprolific coder,\u201d Cherny said Claude has freed up a lot of time for him to focus on the parts of his job he enjoys most.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is how I feel where I don\u2019t have to do the tedious work anymore of coding,\u201d he said. \u201cThe fun part is figuring out what to build, and coming up with this. It\u2019s talking to users. It\u2019s thinking about these big systems. It\u2019s thinking about the future. It\u2019s collaborating with other people on the team, and that\u2019s what I get to do more of now.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n A shift for all computer-based jobs\u00a0<\/p>\n Cherny predicted that AI will expand \u201cto pretty much any kind of work that you can do on a computer,\u201d with tools like Cowork. \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I think back to engineering a year ago, no one really knew what an agent was, no one really used it,\u201d he said. \u201cBut nowadays it\u2019s just the way that we do our work,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cExperiment with the tools, get to know them, don\u2019t be scared of them. Just dive in, try them, be on the bleeding edge, be on the frontier,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n He also recommends that people across all fields become more generalists. Everyone on Claude Code\u2019s team codes, from the product manager to the finance guy, he explained, and the strongest engineers also have an aptitude for design, infrastructure, or business.<\/p>\n \u201cI think a lot of the people that will be rewarded the most over the next few years, they won\u2019t just be AI native, and they don\u2019t just know how to use these tools really well, but also they\u2019re curious and they\u2019re generalists, and they cross over multiple disciplines and can think about the broader problem they\u2019re solving rather than just the engineering part of it, he said.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n With the scale of potential job disruption AI agents could cause, Cherny repeated a common refrain<\/a> used by Anthropic leaders. He said that the future implications of the technology \u201cshouldn\u2019t be up to us,\u201d and that society needs to have a larger conversation about the future of work.<\/p>\n Anthropic takes the disruption \u201cvery, very seriously,\u201d Cherny added, and employs economists and policy and social impact experts to assess the technology.<\/p>\n