Tracking The Tech Bros' Predictions
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and his billionaire friends have been predicting the end of Software Engineering for a while now. As a dev trying to hold down a job in Auckland, NZ, we thought it'd be helpful to track exactly when we need to buy a farm in the Waikato and start raising sheep instead of raising PRs.
July 2023
The Emad Deadline"There will be no programmers in five years."
Former Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque kicks off the panic by giving humanity a hard 5-year expiration date on coding.
February 2024
The Leather Jacket Decree"It is our job to create computing technology such that nobody has to program... Everybody in the world is now a programmer."
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang tells the World Government Summit that kids should stop learning computer science and focus on biology or farming.
March 2024
The "First AI SWE""Meet Devin, the first AI software engineer."
Cognition AI launches Devin with a slick UI, showing it autonomously taking Upwork jobs, fixing bugs, and deploying code. Tech Twitter has a collective meltdown.
March 2025
The Initial Prophecy"In 12 months, we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code."
Speaking at a Council on Foreign Relations meeting, Amodei drops the bomb that AI will write 90% of code in 3-6 months, and 100% within a year.
Late 2025
The Anthropic Dogfooding Era"Pretty much 100% of [Anthropic's] code is written by Claude Code [and] Opus 4.5"
Rumors swirl internally at Anthropic (and later confirmed by creator Boris Cherny) that the company relies entirely on its own models to write code.
January 2026
The Goalpost Shift"We might be six to 12 months away from when the model is doing most, maybe all of what SWEs do end to end."
At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Amodei effectively resets the 12-month clock. He tells The Economist that engineers at Anthropic "don't write any code anymore... just let the model write the code, I edit it."
April 2026 (Present Day)
The Pivot"Don't just learn skills that AI can replace... The safest career path today isn't doctor, engineer, coder. It's becoming someone who can work with AI."
The narrative shifts. 40% of routine office work is now at risk. Amodei advises people to stop trying to be pure coders and become "AI Whisperers" instead.
The Auckland Dev Survival Plan
Since we apparently only ever have 6 to 12 months left, here is the official action plan for the New Zealand software engineering community:
Step 1: Denial
Keep drinking flat whites and writing React components like nothing is happening.
Step 2: Acceptance
Let AI write the boilerplate, then spend 4 hours debugging the weird hallucinated library it imported.
Step 3: Agriculture
Move to Hamilton. Buy some cows. AI can't milk a cow (yet).