Anthropic CEO: AI Will Replace Coding First, But Software Engineering Will Persist

On October 27, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, said in an interview that coding—writing specific lines of code—will be the first task to be fully replaced by AI models, marking the end of the era of pure programming. He made the remarks when asked whether a 25-year-old should still learn programming for success over the next decade.

Amodei distinguished coding from software engineering: while writing code lines will be done by AI, software engineering—working as an architect to design systems, meet real user needs, and manage teams of AI agents—will last longer. Anthropic is an artificial intelligence company.