Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, while speaking at a forum of The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), said that he believes 90% of coding will be done by AI in less than 6 months.
When Mike Froman, the president of CFR, asked about the best case scenarios AI will bring us, Amodei stated, “If I look at coding, programming, which is one area where AI is making the most progress. We are not far from the world where, in 3-6 months, AI is writing 90% of the code.”
He added that in 12 months, AI might be writing essentially all of the code.
While that sounds alarming, he added that the programmer still needs to specify the conditions of what one wants to do, the idea of the app one wants to make, and the design decisions.
While he believes that human programmers’ intervention will still be needed to decide granular aspects of coding, AI will eventually do everything humans can. Amodei expressed his thoughts, encouraging one to look at ‘usefulness’ and ‘uselessness’ in a different way than before.
He noted that AI making everyone useless is an annihilistic thought and emphasised that he is optimistic about building a world where human life is meaningful while taking the help of AI.
Froman also asked Amodei if DeepSeek was a ‘Sputnik moment’. Amodei commented that DeepSeek was nothing unusual and another data point on the cost reduction curve.
A future where everyone would be a coder is getting closer with each passing year – or month, maybe. In a podcast with Lex Fridman, when asked how much programming people would do in the next 5-10 years, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said, “A lot, but I think it’ll be in a very different shape.”
Altman said that many have already started programming entirely in natural language. “No one programs by writing code…some people do. No one programs the pun cards anymore,” he quipped, adding that it would change the nature and the skillset, not so much the predisposition for who we call programmers in the future.
