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Fortune
Fortune
Jacqueline Munis

‘It’s going to be painful for a lot of people’: Software engineers may not exist by year end, says creator of the AI program freaking out the market

Photo of Dario Amodei (Credit: Samyukta Lakshmi—Bloomberg via Getty Images)

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.

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