Claude Code's creator on the end of the software engineer

Sign in<br>Subscribe

Some fun news: we're doing our first-ever Platformer live event on June 2 at Atlassian headquarters in San Francisco, and you can join us! Replika and Wabi founder Eugenia Kuyda will join us for a fascinating conversation about DIY software, the SaasPocalypyse, AI companions, and much more. Plus Platformer fellow and Gen Z AI correspondent Ella Markianos will join me to present the latest research about tech's impact on labor. Only a few dozen tickets are available, so if you're interested I suggest buying one soon. Get all the details here.

This is a column about AI. My fiancé works at Anthropic. See my full ethics disclosure here.<br>In the first two episodes of Platformer ’s mini-series on AI and jobs, we heard from two tech leaders who pushed back on the idea that AI is about to leave most white-collar jobs worthless. Box CEO Aaron Levie argued that the “last mile” of human labor will resist efforts to automate it. And Google’s senior vice president of technology and society, James Manyika, explained how tech has improved at automating tasks but not jobs.<br>For our third episode, I wanted to highlight a contrasting view — someone who believes that AI really is on its way toward eliminating certain jobs. Boris Cherny is the creator and head of Claude Code — the agentic coding tool that Anthropic released last year and is, by most measures, the fastest-growing AI coding tool in the world.<br>Cherny belongs firmly to the camp that believes the end of software engineering as we know it is already underway. He hasn't written a line of code himself in more than six months, and he says that for the kind of work he does, coding is effectively "solved."<br>Given that he is, by his own account, actively automating his own job, it's no surprise that Cherny sees the disruption arriving far faster than our first two guests. He told me that the title "software engineer" could start to disappear by the end of this year, dissolving into something closer to something like "builder" as the designers, product managers, and managers around him start shipping code of their own.<br>But his own jobs forecast is more optimistic — and in some ways similar to our first guests — than some of his more prominent comments about coding being “solved” might suggest. While companies may hire fewer engineers as we know them today, he argues, they’ll hire more of whatever “builder” role replaces them.<br>"I don't think we're going to call them engineers," Cherny told me. "But if we talk about people writing code, or using agents to write code, I think there will be 100 times more engineers than there are today. That's my prediction."<br>Cherny was an unlikely candidate to lead a revolution in coding. He studied economics, dropped out of college to run a startup at 18, did a stint at a hedge fund, and spent five years as a principal engineer at Meta before arriving at Anthropic in September 2024. When he arrived, Cherny began to explore what the company's API could do. The product that became Claude Code began life as a tool to tell him what song he was currently listening to. After iterating it on a couple months, he released the first version of Claude Code internally — and 20 percent of Anthropic’s engineers began using it on the first day.<br>As always, note that my fiancé works at Anthropic. But I couldn’t imagine trying to understand the AI and jobs story in this moment without talking to the person behind Claude Code.<br>Highlights of our conversation are below, edited for clarity and length. Listen to the entire conversation wherever you get your podcasts — just search for Platformer — or watch it on YouTube at youtube.com/caseynewton.<br>And let us know what you think — we're new to podcast production, and welcome your feedback at casey@platformer.news.<br>Casey Newton: You joined Anthropic in September 2024, and my understanding is that no one told you to go build a coding product — you were just trying to learn the API. Can you tell us the origin story of Claude Code? I've read that it controlled your music.<br>Boris Cherny: All of these things are true. I joined this team called the Labs team, which built a bunch of cool stuff. We built Claude Code — I built that. A different person built MCP, someone built Skills, and two other people built the desktop app. That was essentially the size of the team. It was tiny. We built these features over the course of a few months, and because a lot of them were weird ideas, we had no idea whether they were going to work.<br>For a while, Anthropic's focus has been on the same kinds of things: enterprise, coding, and safety. We knew that somewhere in this journey we should probably build some kind of product. Early on, Anthropic didn't actually know if it wanted to build products at all, but if we were going to, it needed to be coding-related, because that helps us build better coding models and it helps us study safety.<br>We didn't know what it...