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.
Microsoft is already using AI to generate 30% of its code. However, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates claimed that coding is one of the professions that remain future-proof in an AI-driven world because software development is too complex to be fully automated.
And, as it now seems, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has joined the choir (via Haider on X), claiming "we might be 6-12 months away from models doing all of what software engineers do end-to-end."
Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei:"we might be 6-12 months away from models doing all of what software engineers do end-to-end"We're approaching a feedback loop where AI builds better AIBut the loop isn't fully closed yet, chip manufacturing and training time still limit speed pic.twitter.com/CZMlbxqS66January 20, 2026
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."
Demis Hassabis says AI can already help with coding and research, but true self-improvement may require AGIIn messy real-world domains, progress slows because results can't be verified quickly, and hardware creates bottlenecks"but in coding and math, recursive improvement is… pic.twitter.com/jCgTIO5NQYJanuary 21, 2026
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.
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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