The warning signs are piling up for anyone still working as a software engineer in 2026.
In a recent episode of former Airbnb guy Lenny Rachitsky’s tidily-named audio show, “Lenny’s Podcast,” the creator of one of the most acclaimed AI coding tools, Boris Cherny, reaffirmed his belief that there are dark days ahead for the world’s software developers.
“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 on the podcast, first spotted by Fortune. “It’s just going to be replaced by ‘builder,’ and it’s going to be painful for a lot of people.”
Cherny is the chief architect of Anthropic’s Claude Code, an agentic AI tool that’s said to autonomously execute software production tasks with little oversight from human beings. While it’s debated how effective Claude Code truly is — there’s been a lot of irritation with how fast the tool seems to drain user credits, for example — it’s taken the programming world by storm nonetheless.
It’s a point Cherny’s keen to stress: “I have not edited a single line by hand since November,” he bragged on the podcast.
Calculated PR-grab the interview may be, Cherny is careful to guard Anthropic’s reputation as the “adult in the room” — relative to other titans of the AI industry, at least.
He admits, for example, that Claude Code has its limitations: “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,” Cherny told Rachitsky. “You have to make sure that it’s correct. You have to make sure it’s safe.”
Still, he’s not immune to indulging in a little future AI hype either. Though Cherny emphasizes that today’s software engineers still need to have a grasp of the fundamentals, he says that “in a year or two, it’s not going to matter.”
At the same time, the creator of Claude Code insisted that Anthropic takes the coming labor-troubles — as if things aren’t bad enough already — “very, very seriously,” suggesting that society writ large needs to have a long conversation about how we’re going to proceed.
That doesn’t mean the fellas at Anthropic are going to stop and wait for the world to catch up, however. “I do think in the meantime, it’s going to be very disruptive,” Cherny reiterated, “and it’s going to be painful for a lot of people.”
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