Claude Code creator Boris Cherny says software engineers are 'more important than ever’ as AI transforms the profession – but Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei still thinks full automation is coming

The creator of Anthropic’s Claude Code tool says software engineers will still play a vital role despite the increased use of AI across the profession – with a notable caveat.

The prediction by Boris Cherny came during an exchange on X, in which a user pondered why engineers are needed at Anthropic if Claude is being used to generate the majority of code.

Cherny’s comments came in the wake of recent claims by Mike Krieger, head of Anthropic Labs, on the scale of AI code generation at the company.

During a discussion at the Cisco AI Summit, Krieger revealed that devs at Anthropic are increasingly relying on Claude to speed up coding practices, product development, and quality control.

“Claude is now writing Claude,” he told Cisco’s Jeetu Patel. “We're moving extremely quickly. Right now for most products at Anthropic it's effectively 100% just Claude writing.”

So does that mean AI is doing all the work at Anthropic? Not exactly. According to Cherny, the increased use of the technology doesn’t mean engineers aren’t needed – if anything they’re “more important than ever”.

“Someone has to prompt the Claudes, talk to customers, coordinate with other teams, decide what to build next,” he wrote. “Engineering is changing and great engineers are more important than ever”.

Job postings at Anthropic do appear back up what Cherny suggested. At the time of writing, the company has 24 open product engineering and design roles, with an additional 26 software engineering positions in infrastructure.

Software developers aren’t going anywhere

Cherny is by no means the first industry figure to highlight the continued need for software developers, and some will take solace in his comments given the state of the industry over the last two years.

Software developers and engineers have faced repeated threats of obsolescence since the advent of generative AI.

Some industry stakeholders have warned the technology will essentially render them useless as enterprises look to automate processes and cut teams.

A host of big tech execs have fired warning shots on this front, including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

During a January 2025 appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast, Zuckerberg claimed AI would be doing the work of most mid-level engineers by the end of the year.

This prediction hasn’t quite materialized, however, and if anything teams could grow as a result of AI.

Speaking to ITPro in December last year, GitLab Field CTO Marco Caronna said he believes AI adoption will ultimately create larger development teams, rather than a wave of job cuts across the industry.

Regardless of what side of the fence industry stakeholders are on with regard to AI coding, the reality is that engineers will face huge changes in years to come.

Previous research from Gartner warned that around 80% of engineers will be forced to reskill or upskill due to the influx of AI tools in the profession, and those who fail to evolve will be left behind as the technology tightens its grip.

Developers probably shouldn’t hold their breath

It’s worth noting that Cherny’s comments on social media came with a big caveat that might not please developers.

During a recent interview at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said advances in AI mean the technology could be doing most of the work in the near future.

“We might be six to 12 months away from when the model is doing most, maybe all, of what software engineers do end-to-end,” he said.

In a follow-up with another poster on X questioning the logic behind engineers still being needed, Cherny noted that Amodei was “describing the current state” of the profession.

“Dario is talking about what’s next,” he added.

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