Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei believes software engineers may soon be an extinct species. In an interview with The Economist at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Amodei said AI models could do “most, maybe all” of what software engineers currently do within six to twelve months. “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,” he said.
The bold prediction sparked intense debate on social media. One user wrote, “Software Engineering Will Be Automatable in 12 Months. Yeah, we’re cooked.” Another noted the shift: “AI models will be able to do most, maybe all of what software engineers do end-to-end within 6 to 12 months, shifting engineers to editors.”
Amodei admitted he wasn’t completely certain how fast the transition will happen, noting some components, like chip manufacturing and model training, can’t yet be automated. Before leading Anthropic, he served as Vice President of Research at OpenAI and worked as a Senior Research Scientist at Google Brain.
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