Well, that absolutely is terrible for those in the field. However, it is going to make designing a website very easy, in the future. Just tell the AI program how you want it to look, and what goes where.

Lynda

Thanks to reader Frederic

By Jacqueline Munis

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.

Claude Code, which was released a year ago, has been widely adopted by software engineers and revolutionized how they approach their work. The tool is more sophisticated than traditional vibe coding with a chatbot. Rather it’s agentic, meaning it can autonomously execute tasks with minimal human intervention. One senior Google engineer said it re-created a year’s worth of work in an hour. Its creator, Boris Cherny, sees an inevitable change coming for coders.

“I 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,” Cherny said recently on an episode of Lenny’s Podcast, hosted by Lenny Rachitsky. “It’s just going to be replaced by ‘builder,’ and it’s going to be painful for a lot of people.”

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’s Bell Labs–style experimental division. The tool was quickly adopted by engineers internally before it was released to the public.

“I have not edited a single line by hand since November,” he said, explaining that he still checks the code. “I don’t think we’re at the point where you can be totally hands-off, especially when there’s a lot of people running the program. You have to make sure that it’s correct. You have to make sure it’s safe.”

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’t updated shared spreadsheets.

Claude Code could be the next printing press, Cherny says

With Claude Code, Cherny says that engineers still have to understand the underlying principles, but “in a year or two, it’s not going to matter.”

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 “historical document” of an interview with a scribe.

The printing press metaphor was beloved in a recent era of tech disruption by another Silicon Valley figure: Mark Zuckerberg, who likened social media’s disruption of other media to the creation of print.