Anthropic's Boris Cherny, creator of the AI coding tool Claude Code, does not believe software engineers are becoming obsolete. Instead, he envisions a future where the number of people writing code—or directing AI agents to do so—will multiply by 100 times in the coming years. The title may change, but the work expands.
Golden Age for Builders
Speaking to tech journalist Casey Newton on the Platformer podcast, Cherny delivered a sharp message to 22-year-old computer science graduates sorting through entry-level job options: skip the job hunt entirely and start a company. 'There has never been a better time in history to do it; it's the golden age,' Cherny said. 'You and your agents can build a giant company.'
YC Founders Embrace AI Code
Cherny backed his prediction with observations from Y Combinator, where he recently met with the latest batch of founders. Instead of asking who used Claude Code, he asked who lets it write 100% of their code. Half the room raised their hands. When he flipped the question—who does not use the model at all—only one founder out of a couple hundred raised a hand. The rest sit somewhere between half and full reliance on AI. 'So coding is getting solved for a bigger and bigger percentage of the code we write,' Cherny said on the podcast.
The shift is not confined to seed-stage startups. Google reports that 75% of its new code is now AI-generated, up from 25% in late 2024. Meta has mandated that 65% of engineers in its creation org—which builds Facebook, WhatsApp, and Messenger—generate more than 75% of their committed code with AI in the first half of 2026. Snap has set a company-wide floor of 65%. Amazon has rolled out Claude Code to every corporate employee through AWS Bedrock.
Inside Anthropic: No Manual Code Since November
Cherny says he has not manually written code himself since November and now ships 22 to 27 pull requests per day, all generated by Claude. At Anthropic, instances of the model communicate with each other over Slack, run in autonomous loops, and resolve engineering tasks across teams with minimal human input. 'There's no manually written code anywhere at the company,' Cherny said in a recent internal talk. He believes integrated development environments like VS Code, Xcode, and Vim are next to go. Claude Code was deliberately built as a terminal-based command-line interface with no graphical user interface, because investing in a rich UI felt like building sandcastles against improving models.
Parallel Views from OpenAI
Sam Altman has been making a similar argument. The OpenAI CEO recently stated that Y Combinator, which he once led, used to weigh technical talent above all else in a founding team. Now, Altman wants to fund people who understand their users deeply and cannot code at all. Cherny would call them builders. He has not settled on what to call the rest yet, but he is certain there will be many more of them.
