Anthropic’s Boris Cherny, Claude Code creator, on future of software engineering: My prediction is that there will be 100 times more of…

Anthropic's Boris Cherny, Claude Code creator, doesn't think the software engineer is going anywhere. He just thinks there are going to be a lot more of them, under a different name. The creator of Claude Code, speaking to tech journalist Casey Newton on the Platformer podcast, predicted that people writing code or directing agents to do it will multiply by 100x in the years ahead. The title might change. The work expands.His message to the 22-year-old computer science graduate sorting through entry-level options is even sharper: skip the job hunt, start a company. "There has never been a better time in history to do it; it's the golden age," Cherny told Newton. "You and your agents can build a giant company."Cherny backed up the prediction with what he saw at Y Combinator, where he recently met the latest batch of founders. Instead of asking who used Claude Code, he asked who lets it write 100% of their code. Half the room raised their hands. When he flipped the question and asked who doesn't use the model at all, only one founder out of a couple hundred put their hand up. The rest sit somewhere between half and full. "So coding is getting solved for a bigger and bigger percentage of the code we write," he said on Platformer.The shift isn't confined to seed-stage startups. Google says 75% of its new code is now AI-generated, up from 25% in late 2024. Meta has mandated that 65% of engineers in its creation org, which builds Facebook, WhatsApp, and Messenger, generate more than 75% of their committed code with AI in the first half of 2026. Snap has set a company-wide floor of 65%. Amazon has rolled Claude Code out to every corporate employee through AWS Bedrock.Cherny says he hasn't manually written code himself since November and ships 22 to 27 pull requests a day, all Claude-generated. At Anthropic, instances of the model talk to each other over Slack, run in autonomous loops, and resolve engineering tasks across teams with little human input. "There's no manually written code anywhere at the company," he said in a recent internal talk. He thinks IDEs like VS Code, Xcode, and Vim are next to go. Claude Code was built as a terminal-based CLI on purpose, with no graphical interface, because investing in a rich UI felt like building sandcastles against improving models.Sam Altman has been making a parallel argument. The OpenAI CEO recently said YC, which he once ran, used to weigh technical talent above everything else on a founding team. Now he wants to fund people who understand their users deeply and can't code at all. Cherny would call them builders. He just hasn't settled on what to call the rest yet, but he's certain there will be a lot more of them.