Coding had been one of the best-paid professions over the last couple of decades, but it could soon be a skill that everyone has.
Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code at Anthropic, believes software is on the verge of being fully democratized — and that the shift will happen faster than most people expect. His argument draws not from the world of technology, but from a parallel in history that is hard to argue with: the invention of the printing press.
“I think it’s going to be even more than that,” Cherny said. “I think it’s going to be a skill — like, I know how to send a text message.”
Cherny, who reads primarily sci-fi and tech history, says the clearest parallel for what is happening right now goes back six centuries. “In tech history, there’s one thing which I think is the clearest parallel for what’s happening right now, and this is the printing press in Europe in the 1400s. Before the printing press, essentially ten percent of the European population was literate. They knew how to read and write. They were often employed by kings and lords who were not literate, and their job was to read and write — this was not something that everyone knew how to do,” he says.
What followed was an explosion in the availability of the written word. “The printing press was invented, then there were two more presses, and in the fifty years after the first printing press, there was more literature published in Europe than in the thousand years before. Over the same period, the cost of a book went down around a hundred times.”
The transition was not instant — and Cherny acknowledges that. But the direction was inevitable. “It took a couple of hundred years, because learning to read and write is hard. You need education systems and government, and everyone can’t be working on farms, and so on. But over the next few hundred years, literacy globally went up to around seventy percent. Now we can all read and write, and you don’t need a degree in reading and writing to know how to read and write. Although there are still professional writers, and that is a thing you can do.”
“I think the thing that’s about to happen — and it’s going to be much faster than fifty years — is that software will be a thing that is fully democratized, that anyone can do.”
For Cherny, democratization does not just mean more people writing code. It means the people best placed to build software are often not engineers at all:
“Let’s say you’re writing accounting software. The best person to write accounting software — I think maybe even today — is not an engineer. It’s a really good accountant, because they know the domain really well, and coding is the easy part. It’s knowing the domain that’s the hard part. And I think this is just obviously the future.”
Cherny’s view sits within a rapidly building consensus. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had said last year that AI could be writing 90% of code within months, and Y Combinator’s Tom Blomfield has argued that software engineer jobs as they exist today will not survive the next decade. GitHub’s own infrastructure is already buckling under the weight of AI agents pushing code at a scale the platform was never designed for — 275 million commits a week and climbing.
What Cherny adds to this debate is the longer arc. Where others focus on displacement, he focuses on democratization. The printing press did not end writing as a profession — it ended writing as an exclusive guild. Professional writers still exist, and they matter. But literacy became a baseline expectation for everyone. If coding follows the same curve, the question is not whether software engineers will survive, but who will start building things that never could have been built before — and what they will make.
The accountant who understands the books better than any engineer, the doctor who knows exactly what a clinical tool needs to do, the logistics manager who has spent twenty years knowing where the system breaks — these are the people Cherny thinks will define the next era of software. Not because engineers go away, but because the barrier between knowing something and building something is about to collapse.