Anthropic's Claude Code creator predicts software engineering title will start to 'go away' in 2026

• Software engineers are increasingly relying on AI agents to write code.
• Boris Cherny, creator of Claude Code, said in an interview that AI "practically solved" coding.
• Cherny said software engineers will take on different tasks beyond coding.

The creator of a popular AI coding agent said software engineering as a job title will soon be a thing of the past as artificial intelligence automates writing code.

Boris Cherny, who created Claude Code at Anthropic, said in an interview with Y Combinator's "Lightcone" podcast that 2026 will bring "insane" developments to AI. That includes a massive shift in the work software engineers do across industries.

"I think today coding is practically solved for me, and I think it'll be the case for everyone regardless of domain," Cherny said in the interview, published Tuesday. "I think we're going to start to see the title 'software engineer' go away. And I think it's just going to be maybe builder, maybe product manager, maybe we'll keep the title as a vestigial thing."

Cherny added that software engineers will not only be coding but increasingly taking on other tasks like "writing specs" — a document that defines what and how something will be built — or talking to users.

"Like this thing that we're starting to see right now in our team, where engineers are very much generalists, and every single function on our team codes," he said — including product managers, designers, engineering manager, and finance people.

Tech executives and founders have said advancements in AI have rapidly changed the way their teams operate in the past few years

Jesal Gadhia, a startup founder, recently told Business Insider that all the code for his company were written by agents, which wouldn't have been possible in 2024.

Agents like Claude have changed how software engineers work as they spend more time reviewing or debugging code rather than writing lines of it.

Some in the industry have started to note the unintended consequences of relying on AI. A software engineer told Business Insider that AI has simultaneously made them productive and overworked, leading to "AI fatigue."

Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI and Tesla's ex-head of AI, said in January that he has noticed his ability to manually code has started to "atrophy."