Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
Key takeaways:
- Claude Code creator Boris Cherny thinks coding is solved. What remains is directing agents, understanding users, and deciding what to build.
- Not everyone is buying it: some say “builder” strips engineering of its complexity.
- The middle ground is the most compelling. Less syntax, more judgment – experienced engineers still decide what ships and keep work grounded in reality.
Boris Cherny, the creator and head of Claude Code, reckons software engineering as we know it is already changing beyond recognition.
In an interview with Platformer, Cherny said he had not written a line of code himself in more than six months, arguing that, for the kind of work he does, coding is effectively “solved.”
The work that remains, he suggested, is less about typing syntax and more about directing agents, understanding users, planning products, and deciding what should be built next.
That could mean the title itself starts to disappear. “I don’t think we’re going to call them engineers,” Cherny told Platformer. “But if we talk about people writing code, or using agents to write code, I think there will be 100-times more engineers than there are today.”
In other words: fewer people may be hired to do software engineering as it has traditionally been understood, but many more people may use AI agents to produce software. The developer therefore becomes something closer to a builder.
This echoes language used by Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince in a recent Wall Street Journal column, where he divided company roles into “builders,” “sellers” and “measurers.”
Prince argued that builders and sellers are relatively safe in an AI economy because they make and sell the things customers want, while “measurers” – people in oversight, reporting, compliance, and middle-management functions – are more vulnerable to automation.
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What’s in a name?
To call developers “builders” does a disservice to the complexity of their job, says Drew DeVault, who calls himself a software engineer, rather than a developer or programmer.
“I think it’s pretty obnoxious to frame it that way [as builders],” he says. “To be honest, I kind of feel like, if anything, developers are becoming more like the good German,” referring to Germans who, after the Second World War, claimed to not agree with the Nazis – but also didn’t do anything to stop their spread.
DeVault believes that engineering is a discipline – and one to be proud of. “It involves careful planning, it involves a set of certain skills that involves understanding your system and what you’re trying to do with the system, and how your solution fits within the constraints of the system,” he explains.
Then, once a solution is reached, there’s a process of trying to synthesize that into code form. “You can’t just let a machine do it,” he says. “It’ll f*ck it up.”
Pessimism, optimism, or a blend of both?
While DeVault has a pessimistic point of view when it comes to the use of AI in software development – one that also bleeds into his view of whether he ought to be considered a builder or not – there are those who believe that AI still has a role to play in augmenting skills.
“Vibe coding is making it possible for people with no technical background to build things they couldn’t have built before. I think we’re only at the beginning of that,” says Katie Wokasch, head of product engineering at name.com.
That’s no bad thing, but it’s not ever going to be a one-for-one replacement for skilled individuals with the requisite technical experience, she adds.
“Experienced engineers still matter. A lot,” she says. “They’re the ones reviewing the output, deciding what should actually ship, and keeping the work grounded in reality. A prototype can show you what’s possible. Engineering makes sure it still works when real people start using it.”
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Finding the right words
Neither necessarily agrees with Cherny’s characterization of their roles – nor that “builder” is the right terminology for it. However, Wokasch thinks that AI has a role to play in the process.
“AI changes the shape of the job. Engineers spend less time translating thought into syntax, and more time guiding systems, making architecture decisions, catching problems, and connecting the work back to product, business, and customer value,” she says. “Less syntax. More judgment. Engineering isn’t disappearing. It’s evolving.”
DeVault believes that the attempted rewording of the job title is down to an obsession with AI that those closest to the technology appear to have.
“We had ‘move fast and break things’ became the norm long before AI was here,” he says. “AI is reaching the sort of exponential explosion end of that curve, where nothing matters, morals don’t exist, ethics don’t exist. It’s where we’ve been going for a long time.”
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DeVault argues that, if developers have become builders, then they’re not building stuff that’s likely to last – and it’s not a terminology he’s happy to be linked to.
“It’s a garbage tool that produces garbage results that also produces all of these problems,” he says. “It’s particularly grotesque to see it on the rise right now.”
