GoKawiilJul 12, 2026
I harass the sea with my tiny boat and am called a pirate, you do it with a great fleet and are called a king.
Anthropic is actively campaigning to end software engineering. They need you to believe they can do that. Well, maybe it’s not you that they need to convince. Maybe it’s your C-Suite, various world leaders, or the manager of your retirement fund. They’ve raised $132 billion in investment, and are approaching an IPO valued over $1 trillion. Since they cannot show profitability, this depends on selling their hypothetical future impact.
In literary terms, Anthropic is an unreliable narrator.
One of their key narratives is: Coding is going away, then the rest of software engineering, and eventually most other human labor. This kind of money behind this kind of story has an impact, regardless of how true we think the story is.
People will make architecture, product, and staffing decisions based on these events. Many of those decisions will be based on fear - fear of layoffs, rapture-esk warnings of being “Left Behind”, Doom Trolling, etc…
To make good decisions we need to think clearly, which is hard right now. Put on your skeptical hat.
Views are my own. I have no history with Zig. I’ve never spoken to Andrew Kelley, but found his recent JetBrains interview a great watch.
My interest here is in public literacy about AI in software. That’s been my career focus now for 3 years, along with improving the technology itself. During half of that time I was Chief Architect of a coding agent startup - both a customer of Anthropic’s models and competitor to their agent Claude Code. My current project is The Coding Agency.
So where were we?
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