What Happened
GrepJob, a hiring trends tracker, published data showing Anthropic's open software engineering positions have increased by 188% - even as company leadership has spent the past year publicly predicting the end of the programming profession.
The timeline of statements from Anthropic executives is striking:
- March 2025: CEO Dario Amodei said "I think we'll be there in three to six months - where AI is writing 90 percent of the code."
- May 2025: Amodei warned AI could eliminate half of entry-level white-collar jobs and push unemployment to 10-20% within one to five years.
- November 2025: Engineer Adam Wolff said "Maybe as soon as the first half of next year: software engineering is done."
- January 2026: Amodei claimed models may handle most or all software engineer work within six to twelve months.
- February 2026: Boris Cherny, who created Claude Code, suggested the job title itself may disappear soon.
Meanwhile, the company kept adding headcount for the very role its leaders were eulogizing.
Why It Matters
If you're a developer watching AI progress and wondering about your career, the signal here is clearer than the noise. The company building one of the most capable coding AI systems on the planet is hiring more software engineers, not fewer. That's worth more than any prediction about timelines.
This pattern isn't unique to Anthropic. Most major AI companies are hiring aggressively for engineering talent while simultaneously marketing their products as developer replacements. The gap between public messaging (designed to sell AI tools) and internal resource allocation (designed to ship products) tells you where the real confidence lies.
For individual contributors worried about job security: watch what companies do with their hiring budgets, not what their CEOs say on podcasts.
Our Take
There's no contradiction here if you understand the incentive structure. Anthropic's leadership has every reason to hype AI capabilities - it drives adoption, attracts investment, and positions Claude as the must-have tool. But when it comes to actually building that tool, they need human engineers. Lots of them, apparently 188% more than before.
The "AI will replace programmers" narrative has a shelf life problem. Every six months, the goalposts move. Amodei's March 2025 prediction of "90% of code by AI in three to six months" should have landed by September 2025. It didn't. The January 2026 prediction of "six to twelve months" puts us at July 2026 at the earliest. We'll see.
What's actually happening is more mundane and more useful: AI tools are making developers faster. GoDaddy just reported 50% shorter sprints using Claude Code. That's a productivity multiplier, not a replacement. The engineers who learn to use these tools well will be more valuable, not obsolete.
Stop listening to the predictions. Start watching the hiring pages.