The "Software Engineer" profession in its current form won't last long 💀

I listened to a podcast from YC with the creator of Claude Code (Boris Cherniy from Anthropic).

There are interesting thoughts below 👇

1️⃣ At Anthropic, there is an internal rule: never build products around the capabilities of the current model. What the current neural network struggles with and hallucinates on today, it will handle effortlessly tomorrow. Trying to write workarounds to bypass today's AI limitations is a waste of time.

2️⃣ Nobody asks the neural network to just "write a function" anymore. Internally, swarms of sub-agents are working. A memory leak occurred? One agent digs into the logs, a second analyzes the heap dump, a third writes a fix, a fourth checks if it broke production.

3️⃣ Writing code is finally separating from design. You no longer write logic by hand. You write a spec. The agent generates a detailed plan. You, as a human, critique that plan, find logical holes, and fix the architecture. Only when the plan is perfect do the agents go write the code.

4️⃣ Cherniy says that writing code will soon be a "solved problem" for everyone. Inside Anthropic, an engineer with proper AI usage already shows x1000 productivity compared to a standard senior at Google.

5️⃣ In a couple of years, the title "programmer" itself will start to die out. The market will split into two castes:
🟢 Hyper-generalists: People who don't care what they write in. They understand product logic, business tasks, and system architecture. They use AI to throw together an MVP in an evening that used to take a team of five a month. Their main value is systems thinking and the ability to decompose an abstract business desire down to a level the neural network can digest.
🟢 Hyper-specialists: People who can go down to the C/Rust level, find a memory leak in the guts of an interpreter, rewrite the runtime, or optimize a database cluster to save the company millions. Neural networks won't get there soon because it requires context not found in training datasets on GitHub.

Choose your destiny!
👨‍💻 — I'll be a hyper-generalist!
👾 — I'll be a hyper-specialist!
🗿 — And I'm a sparrow!