At a time when companies — particularly in big tech — are cutting human roles while investing heavily in AI, anxiety about job displacement is growing. Now, one tech founder is predicting that one of the most rigorous and highest-paid professions could fundamentally change by the end of 2026.
During a Feb. 19, 2026, appearance on Lenny Rachitsky’s “Lenny’s Podcast,” Boris Cherny, creator and head of Claude Code at Anthropic, said he believes coding has effectively been “solved.” As a result, he sees an inevitable transformation ahead for software engineers in the age of AI.
“I think by the end of the year, everyone is going to be a product manager, and everyone codes. The title software engineer is going to start to go away,” Cherny said, Fortune reports. “It’s just going to be replaced by ‘builder,’ and it’s going to be painful for a lot of people.”
What Is Claude Code?
Cherny developed Claude Code while in Anthropic‘s Bell Labs-style experimental division, per Fortune. Released in 2025, the agentic system is capable of autonomously executing tasks with minimal human intervention.
According to the outlet, Cherny said he hasn’t manually edited a single line of code since November 2025 — Claude Code now writes 100% of his production code. However, he reviews the output to ensure accuracy, adding that the technology isn’t yet at the point where teams can be completely hands-off, notes Fortune.
Still, he said, the shift has freed up significant time, allowing him to focus on the parts of his work he finds most rewarding.
“This is how I feel where I don’t have to do the tedious work anymore of coding,” Cherny said, per the outlet. “The fun part is figuring out what to build, and coming up with this. It’s talking to users. It’s thinking about these big systems. It’s thinking about the future. It’s collaborating with other people on the team, and that’s what I get to do more of now.”
For semi-technical users and non-coders, Anthropic has also released Cowork, a more user-friendly AI agent designed to take autonomous action without programming knowledge, according to Fortune. Launched in early February 2026, Cowork is particularly well-suited for daily management and organizational tasks, the outlet notes.
While Cherny said engineers using Claude Code still need to understand core technical principles today, he suggested that “in a year or two, it’s not going to matter,” Fortune reports. He also predicts that tools like Cowork will expand into “pretty much any kind of work that you can do on a computer.”
Cherny predicted that by the end of this year, many companies and individual developers will rely on AI tools like Claude to generate all of their code, according to the outlet.
How To Succeed Amid AI Acceleration
As for how people can succeed during this period of disruption, Cherny advised adaptation over avoidance, Fortune reports. Rather than fearing AI tools or pretending they don’t exist, he recommended actively experimenting with them and learning how they work.
He also encouraged professionals across industries to become more generalists. On the Claude Code team, he noted, everyone — from the product manager to the finance lead — knows how to code.
“I think a lot of the people that will be rewarded the most over the next few years, they won’t just be AI native, and they don’t just know how to use these tools really well, but also they’re curious and they’re generalists, and they cross over multiple disciplines and can think about the broader problem they’re solving rather than just the engineering part of it,” Cherny said, per Fortune.
Given the scale of potential job disruption AI agents could cause, he argued that the broader societal implications “shouldn’t be up to us,” according to the outlet. Instead, he said, society needs to lead the bigger conversation about the future of work.
