Software engineering has six to twelve months left.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and his billionaire friends have been predicting the end of Software Engineering for a while now. This is the public record for Auckland devs who would like to know exactly when to buy a Waikato farm and start raising sheep instead of raising PRs.
01 / The archive
Every deadline. Every pivot.
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.
August 2024
The 24-Month Countdown"If you go forward 24 months from now... it's possible that most developers are not coding."
AWS CEO Matt Garman tells an internal fireside chat that AI will absorb the typing, leaving engineers to focus on customers, innovation, and the thing they actually want to build. The deadline lands in June 2026, which is going to be awkward.
January 2025
The Mid-Level Clone"Probably in 2025... we'll have an AI that can effectively be a sort of mid-level engineer... that can write code."
On the Joe Rogan Experience, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg predicts that Meta and its peers will have AI engineers writing a lot of their app code instead of people engineers.
January 2025
The Zero-Hire Sprint"This is the first year in the history of Salesforce after 25 years, I will not hire any net new software engineers."
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says AI-driven engineering productivity is up more than 30%, so the company can keep engineering headcount flat while adding salespeople to explain the AI.
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.
May 2025
The Entry-Level Extinction Event"AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs — and spike unemployment to 10–20% in the next one to five years."
Amodei broadens the forecast from lines of code to the people who are supposed to learn by writing them, telling Axios that companies and governments should stop sugar-coating what is coming.
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."
February 2026
The Compiler Funeral"By the end of this year you don't even bother doing coding. The AI just creates the binary directly."
At an xAI all-hands, Elon Musk says source code itself is an unnecessary intermediate step: describe the outcome, let the AI emit an optimized binary, and wave goodbye to Python, C++, and the rest of us.
April 2026
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.
June 2026
The Deadline Review"Close. I think we probably didn't exactly hit it, but we're directionally on that path."
Asked whether the 24-month prediction came true, Garman says Amazon did not quite hit it. Most Amazon developers and engineers are no longer authoring Java the old-fashioned way, but fully autonomous "go write S3" remains a long way off.
June–July 2026
The Typing Obituary"Every one of my software engineers prefers to be building agents than to be writing Python code."
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says AI will create more software-engineering work while the typing part of the job fades away. He reframes the replacement as a promotion into building agents instead of writing Python.
August 2026
The Inertia Patch"I was wrong about a few things, one of them, in terms of the speed."
On David Senra's podcast, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says the software business did not get disrupted as quickly as he expected after GPT-4. The apocalypse is still on the roadmap; the launch has simply encountered economic inertia.
September 2026
The Software Factory"The big theme of the past months has been that everything is now a coding agent. Whether the visible code is your output or not, agents write your artifacts."
Inside OpenAI, Codex now writes, tests, reviews, deploys and monitors code. Humans define the outcome and approve the risky changes. IDE usage has been falling since January.
September 2026
Pencils Down"Writing code by hand is no longer an economically productive enterprise for the vast majority of programmers working at the vast majority of companies."
At Rails World, DHH says 37signals has gone "pencils down" on hand-written code and that he retired as a professional programmer around March. Hand-coding is now an exception, like a bug in Sentry. The skeptic didn't predict a date; he declared it already happened.
September 2026
Field Closed"I was one of the best, according to myself. My field is over, right?"
On Inside Blackstone, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt says Claude Code and Codex write code he could never write, even at 22. He still tells people to learn coding, but as architects who say what they want built.
October 2026
The Handloom Era"AI already can write better code than at least 60-70% of software engineers out there. And in maybe three to six months, when things accelerate, AI can do better software than maybe 90% of software engineers."
At TechSparks, Zoho's Sridhar Vembu compares coding to handloom weaving and gives AI three to six months to beat 90% of engineers, while saying Zoho redeploys people instead of laying them off.
October 2026
Not Over, Just Different"Engineers are no less valuable, but their work is changing."
Anthropic's engineering blog: seven people built a new source control system in five months while daily merges grew 10x. Claude out-codes them, but engineers still own the design tradeoffs, and very often their job is to tell Claude "no."
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).