Anthropic’s new Claude 4.5 Opus model has topped the SWE-Bench benchmark, making it the top model in the world for coding, but AI could soon take over the field altogether.
Adam Wolff, who works on Claude Code at Anthropic, has said that software engineering could be “done” by the first half of next year. He says that just how we don’t verify if compliers write correct machine code based on the high level code programmers write, we soon won’t need to verify high-level code written by AI — it will nearly always work. Wolff was previously an Engineering Director at Met and a VP of Engineering at Robinhood before joining Anthropic in 2024.
“This new model is something else,” Wolff said on X, referring to Claude 4.5 Opus. “Since Sonnet 4.5, I’ve been tracking how long I can get the agent to work autonomously. With Opus 4.5, this is starting to routinely stretch to 20 or 30 minutes. When I come back, the task is often done—simply and idiomatically,” he added.
“I believe this new model in Claude Code is a glimpse of the future we’re hurtling towards, maybe as soon as the first half of next year: software engineering is done. Soon, we won’t bother to check generated code, for the same reasons we don’t check compiler output,” he said.
Wolff said that this progress scared him as a programmer, even though he was instrumental in creating it. “I love programming, and it’s a little scary to think it might not be a big part of my job. But coding was always the easy part. The hard part is requirements, goals, feedback—figuring out what to build and whether it’s working. There’s still so much left to do, and plenty the models aren’t close to yet: architecture, system design, understanding users, coordinating across teams. It’s going to continuing be fun and very interesting for the foreseeable future,” he said.
Wolff isn’t the only Anthropic executive that has been predicting rapid advancements in fields like coding. Earlier this year, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had said that AI would be writing 90% of the code in 3-6 months. While some had maintained that the prediction hadn’t necessarily come true, Amodei had said in October that AI was already writing 90% of the code at Anthropic. Amodei has also been saying that 50% of all white collar jobs could be eliminated by 2030 owing to gains from AI. And with another prediction about software engineering coming in from an Anthropic employee, it appears that Anthropic seems more bullish than most on how AI models could rapidly progress — and impact the real world — in the coming years.