It’s now widely accepted that AI will disrupt programming, but the disruption might be coming a lot sooner than most people expect.
Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, maker of the Claude series of models, recently made a startling prediction about the future of coding. In a discussion, he suggested that AI’s rapid advancement could lead to a near-complete takeover of coding tasks within the next year. This claim comes as AI coding tools like GitHub Copilot and Anthropic’s own Claude Code are demonstrating increasingly sophisticated abilities, generating functional code from natural language prompts and even debugging existing code. Amodei’s timeline, however, is significantly more aggressive than most industry forecasts.
“But now, getting to the job side of (programming),” Amodei stated, “I do have a fair amount of concern about this.”
He continued, “On one hand, I think comparative advantage is a very powerful tool. If I look at coding, programming, which is one area where AI is making the most progress, what we are finding is we are not far from a world – I think we’ll be there in three to six months – where AI is writing 90% of the code.”
Amodei concluded with his most striking prediction: “And then in 12 months, we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code.”
These statements paint a picture of a near future where the role of human programmers changes drastically. Amodei’s concern stems from the potential displacement of a significant portion of the software development workforce. While he acknowledges the power of comparative advantage, implying humans will shift to higher-level tasks, the sheer speed of this projected transformation raises critical questions about workforce adaptation and the need for retraining programs.
The implications of Amodei’s predictions are profound. If 90% of code is indeed generated by AI within the next six months, it could trigger a massive shift in the software development industry. Anthropic isn’t the only AI company predicting this — OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said that the world’s best coder by the end of 2025 will be an AI. This could cause companies to significantly reduce their programming teams, focusing instead on prompt engineering and AI oversight roles. Universities and coding boot camps would need to adapt their curricula to prepare students for this new reality. While the demand for highly specialized programmers might persist, the need for entry-level coders could dramatically decrease. Furthermore, the very nature of software development could change, with AI handling the bulk of the repetitive coding tasks, allowing humans to focus on more creative and strategic aspects like design, architecture, and problem-solving. But not everyone’s convinced that Amodei’s predictions will come to pass — some X users pointed out that Anthropic was still actively hiring software engineers, which it wouldn’t necessarily need to if coding were to become obsolete in a year. But with leaders of the two most valuable AI companies hinting that coding could soon be a solved problem, it could end up changing the world as we know it.