Software jobs at risk: AI could take over most coding tasks in just 6–12 months, warns Anthropic CEO

Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, highlighted the trend during the World Economic Forum in Davos.

He was quoted as saying by the media, “I have engineers within Anthropic who say I don’t write any code anymore. I just let the model write the code, I edit it. I do the things around it.”

Amodei further cautioned about the speed of transformation in the software engineering profession: “I think… I don’t know… we might be six to twelve months away from when the model is doing most, maybe all of what SWEs (software engineers) do end to end. Then it’s a question of how fast does that loop close.”

Echoing the seriousness of Amodei’s warning, Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu urged people to pay attention, tweeting, “We better pay attention to him because he has the best coding tool in the world.”

Former Dropbox CTO and the managing partner at South Park Commons, Aditya Agarwal expressed a similar opinion on X, where he wrote: "I spent a lot of time over the weekend writing code with Claude. And it was very clear that we will never ever write code by hand again. It doesn't make any sense to do so."

"Something I was very good at is now free and abundant. I am happy...but disoriented. At the same time, something I spent my early career building (social networks) was being created by lobster-agents. It's all a bit silly...but if you zoom out, it's kind of indistinguishable from humans on the larger internet," he said.

"So both the form and function of my early career are now produced by AI. I am happy but also sad and confused. If anything, this whole period is showing me what it is like to be human again," he said.

Meanwhile, UN Secretary-General António Guterres emphasized the rapid pace of AI development, stating, “AI is moving at the speed of light,” while unveiling experts nominated to the Independent International Scientific Panel tasked with assessing AI’s global impact.

Guterres added, “We need shared understandings to build effective guardrails, unlock innovation for the common good, and foster cooperation. The Panel will help the world separate fact from fakes, and science from slop.”

The roots of the Panel trace back to 2023, following the release of ChatGPT and other generative AI technologies that signaled a new era in artificial intelligence. Guterres convened leading technologists and academics to develop recommendations for safe and effective AI governance.

The newly formed Panel, according to Guterres, will be “the first global, fully independent scientific body dedicated to helping close the AI knowledge gap and assess the real impacts of AI across economies and societies.” Panel members will exchange ideas, conduct deep dives into priority areas such as health, energy, and education, and share cutting-edge research to guide AI policy worldwide.