Software Engineering To Be Obsolete In A Year? Anthropic CEO Warns, Vembu Says Pay Attention

Software engineering may be the profession feeling the sharpest impact of artificial intelligence, with core tasks such as coding increasingly being handled by AI systems. Tech giants like Google, Amazon and Microsoft are already using AI to generate portions of new codebases—a trend expected to accelerate.

Against this backdrop, Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic, has issued a stark warning: software engineering as a profession could effectively become obsolete within the next 12 months. While the claim has sparked debate, it has also drawn support from industry leaders, including Sridhar Vembu, founder of Zoho, who says the warning deserves serious attention.

Amodei made the remarks last month at the World Economic Forum annual meeting

in Davos, where he spoke about how rapidly AI is reshaping jobs, productivity and the global economy. He argued that the impact of AI on employment is no longer theoretical, particularly in software development.

The comments went viral online, drawing both agreement and scepticism. Responding to a clip of Amodei’s remarks shared on X, Vembu urged people not to dismiss the warning. “We better pay attention to him because he has the best coding tool in the world,” Vembu wrote, noting that the message carries weight because it comes from the head of a company building some of the most advanced AI coding tools.

Explaining his concern, Amodei said AI is rapidly shifting from being a productivity aid to becoming the primary executor of work. Software development, he noted, is among the clearest examples of this transition. At Anthropic itself, engineers increasingly rely on AI models to generate code, stepping in mainly to review and refine outputs.

“I have engineering leads who have basically said to me, ‘I don’t write any code anymore. I just let Opus do the work and I edit it,’” Amodei said.

While his warning focused on coders, Amodei cautioned that the implications extend far beyond software teams. He said AI could drive significant job losses across industries as models grow more capable at an accelerating pace.

“We basically have a Moore’s Law for intelligence, where the model is getting more and more cognitively capable every few months,” he said, arguing that as AI takes on increasingly complex tasks, the need for large teams of human programmers could shrink dramatically—potentially eliminating job categories that took decades to build.