The era of humans manually writing software code is coming to an end, proclaimed Ryan Dahl, the creator of JavaScript runtime Deno and Node.js. In a post on X, Dahl said that while software engineers will continue to play an important role, directly writing syntax will no longer be central to their work.
“This has been said a thousand times before, but allow me to add my own voice: the era of humans writing code is over,” Dahl wrote. “Disturbing for those of us who identify as SWEs, but no less true. That’s not to say SWEs don’t have work to do, but writing syntax directly is not it.”
Dahl’s comments come amid rapid advances in AI tools that can generate, debug, and optimise code with minimal human input. Products such as GitHub Copilot, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Anthropic’s Claude Code are increasingly used by developers to automate routine programming tasks, shifting human effort toward system design, problem definition, and oversight.
Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, also believes that automation of software coding may be closer than many expect, with AI systems poised to take over most end-to-end programming work within the next year.
Speaking at the World Economic Forum 2026 in Davos, Amodei said that recent advances in AI coding tools are already changing how engineers work inside his company and could soon redefine the software industry more broadly. The session featured Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, who also spoke about the impact of AI on work and jobs.
“I have engineers within Anthropic who say, ‘I don’t write any code anymore. I just let the model write the code. I edit it, I do the things around it,’” Amodei said.
The key driver, according to Amodei, is a feedback loop in which AI systems that are good at coding and AI research are used to build the next generation of models.
However, Amodei cautioned that not every part of AI development can be automated. Physical constraints such as chip manufacturing, model training time, and infrastructure still impose limits.
Even so, he said it is difficult to envision a scenario where full-scale automation of coding takes significantly longer than a few years.
AI May Disrupt Entry-Level Jobs
AI is beginning to affect internships and entry-level jobs, but it could also help young people become job-ready faster, Hassabis said. He added that the shift toward fewer junior roles and greater individual leverage through AI is likely to accelerate over the next five years.
Hassabis said there are early signs that AI is already affecting hiring at the bottom of the career ladder.
“This year, the beginnings of maybe impacting the junior-level, entry-level kind of jobs, internships,” Hassabis said. “I think there is some evidence… maybe like a slowdown in hiring in that.”
However, he argued that this impact could be more than offset by the rise of powerful AI tools that are now widely accessible at low or no cost—tools he believes can outperform the traditional learning benefits of internships.
Hassabis acknowledged that even AI builders themselves struggle to fully explore the capabilities of today’s systems, let alone what is coming next.
“Even those of us building it—we’re so busy building it—it’s hard to have time to really explore the capability overhang even today’s models and products have,” he said.
According to Hassabis, mastering AI tools could allow young workers to “leapfrog” traditional career pathways and become professionally useful faster than through conventional internships.
In April 2025, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that more than 30% of the company’s code is now written by AI. Around the same time, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that AI systems are responsible for about 30% of the code produced at Microsoft.
AI-first companies are seeing even bigger changes. In May 2025, a senior engineer at Anthropic said that nearly 80% of Claude Code’s own codebase is written by the AI tool itself. Boris Cherny, who created Claude Code, said he had not written any production code for over a month, as the AI now handles most of the work. Google executive Jeff Dean said in May 2025 that AI is quickly reaching the level of a junior software developer.
The post Anthropic, DeepMind, Node.js Leaders Believe Era of Humans Writing Code is Over appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.
