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From the 2nd link I posted: > Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who once claimed AI could eliminate 50% of white-collar jobs, now says automation may actually expand

From the 2nd link I posted: > Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who once claimed AI could eliminate 50% of white-collar jobs, now says automation may actually expand the work people do. Is pivoting from 50% elimination to actually expanding work not a drastic enough? Do you think AI has eliminated writing code? I still write code every day. The AI is more a thing I ask questions and it gives me right answers about 40% of the time.

SpicyLemonZest 5mo ago
Yes, I think AI has eliminated writing code. Everyone I personally know working in software stopped writing code some time between December and March. (It's true that AI continues to routinely make errors; if you've heard the term "agentic workflows", that's the standard strategy for mitigating the error rate by allowing the AI to check its own work.) That's why I think Amodei's January 2026 prediction that AI could eliminate 50% of entry level white collar jobs in 1-5 years remains plausible. Your second article says something different, but this is because it's full of misquotes. The link supporting "50% of jobs" specifically says entry level, and the link supporting "reframed automation... not as a destroyer of jobs" has Amodei saying not that jobs won't be destroyed but that new jobs may be created to replace them. If AI moves sufficiently slowly to let that happen, which he explicitly cautions it may not.
- bigstrat2003 5mo ago
  > Yes, I think AI has eliminated writing code. Then you are dead wrong. Anyone who gives a shit about doing a good job is still writing code.
  - SpicyLemonZest 5mo ago
    No, that’s not accurate. I’m not sure what to tell you. It’s like hearing that no serious programmer uses Python, it’s so far from my experience and that of everyone I know in the field that I don’t know how to engage.
    - skydhash 5mo ago
      Do you think that everyone in the Linux kernel team write their code using AI only? What about Emacs? And cURL?
      - reverius42 5mo ago
        Ok, how about Ladybird: https://ladybird.org/posts/adopting-rust/ https://ladybird.org/posts/adopting-rust/ > I used Claude Code and Codex for the translation. This was human-directed, not autonomous code generation. I decided what to port, in what order, and what the Rust code should look like. It was hundreds of small prompts, steering the agents where things needed to go. After the initial translation, I ran multiple passes of adversarial review, asking different models to analyze the code for mistakes and bad patterns. Sounds to me like "wrote their code using AI only". And from the creator of Redis, antirez: https://antirez.com/news/158 https://antirez.com/news/158 > It is simply impossible not to see the reality of what is happening. Writing code is no longer needed for the most part.
        potatototoo99 5mo ago
        I guess when you have 65k tests you can use an AI for transpiling, and it still seems it took an enormous amount of hand holding. That is very far from actually writing new code. But you tell me, are you a software developer? Write or have code written everyday? I am one and for me and everyone I know AI has been mostly just a (fantastic) replacement for google search.
        reverius42 5mo ago
        > took an enormous amount of hand holding There's a big difference between "not writing any code by hand" (which still might involve lots of non-manual-coding effort!), and "vibecoding", and as I understand this thread was about the former. edit: yes, I'm a software developer, and if I have a change in mind larger than 2 lines I've been using Claude Code (with English input) rather than a text editor to do it, since about January.
  - D-Machine 5mo ago
    GP posting "Everyone I personally know working in software stopped writing code" on HN is such an obvious tell of blinkered delusion. Literally all HN talks about is AI these days, and it is very, very clear that plenty of people are still writing lots of code, many finding AI makes them slower and causes more problems, and many making the reverse claims. There is always a rich mix of opinions and experiences here. You would have to believe that literally everyone on HN is a bot (and also everyone on Reddit, Twitter, astralcodexten, or anywhere else online) to discount all these differing opinions in favor of "everyone I personally know" .
  - llbbdd 5mo ago
    If you can describe the code you want to write, AI can write it exactly the way you would have, but faster than you every time. That is the floor now.
threethirtytwo 5mo ago
YOU still write code. I would say over 65-70% of modern programmers no longer write code. The paradigm shift happened within the last 365 days.
- esailija 5mo ago
  65-70% "programmers" never wrote code in the first place. Before AI cargo culters just copy pasted code from tutorials, stack overflow, github and so on. With AI they merely continue not writing code. Some people didn't do anything, not even copy paste, see r/overemployed although I have not checked it after AI... maybe it's no longer possible to hold a dev job without actually doing anything. Programmers still write code. They have enough expertise from actually programming to understand that the untouched output from AI is not good enough to be professionally responsible for.
  - threethirtytwo 5mo ago
    No. You can't get very far copying and pasting from stack overflow. I'm talking about legit programmers which are around 90% imho. Out of those programmers 65-70% no longer write code.
- user43928 5mo ago
  At work I still write code, but at home I don't think I wrote anything in months. There's nothing that I can't tell Claude Opus or GPT 5.5 to do for me instead. At work, where I don't have cheap AI subscriptions, access to the SOTA, and where code needs to follow conventions more strictly, I still have to write the code by hand often.

SpicyLemonZest 5mo ago

Yes, I think AI has eliminated writing code. Everyone I personally know working in software stopped writing code some time between December and March. (It's true that AI continues to routinely make errors; if you've heard the term "agentic workflows", that's the standard strategy for mitigating the error rate by allowing the AI to check its own work.) That's why I think Amodei's January 2026 prediction that AI could eliminate 50% of entry level white collar jobs in 1-5 years remains plausible. Your second article says something different, but this is because it's full of misquotes. The link supporting "50% of jobs" specifically says entry level, and the link supporting "reframed automation... not as a destroyer of jobs" has Amodei saying not that jobs won't be destroyed but that new jobs may be created to replace them. If AI moves sufficiently slowly to let that happen, which he explicitly cautions it may not.

bigstrat2003 5mo ago
> Yes, I think AI has eliminated writing code. Then you are dead wrong. Anyone who gives a shit about doing a good job is still writing code.
- SpicyLemonZest 5mo ago
  No, that’s not accurate. I’m not sure what to tell you. It’s like hearing that no serious programmer uses Python, it’s so far from my experience and that of everyone I know in the field that I don’t know how to engage.
  - skydhash 5mo ago
    Do you think that everyone in the Linux kernel team write their code using AI only? What about Emacs? And cURL?
    - reverius42 5mo ago
      Ok, how about Ladybird: https://ladybird.org/posts/adopting-rust/ https://ladybird.org/posts/adopting-rust/ > I used Claude Code and Codex for the translation. This was human-directed, not autonomous code generation. I decided what to port, in what order, and what the Rust code should look like. It was hundreds of small prompts, steering the agents where things needed to go. After the initial translation, I ran multiple passes of adversarial review, asking different models to analyze the code for mistakes and bad patterns. Sounds to me like "wrote their code using AI only". And from the creator of Redis, antirez: https://antirez.com/news/158 https://antirez.com/news/158 > It is simply impossible not to see the reality of what is happening. Writing code is no longer needed for the most part.
      - potatototoo99 5mo ago
        I guess when you have 65k tests you can use an AI for transpiling, and it still seems it took an enormous amount of hand holding. That is very far from actually writing new code. But you tell me, are you a software developer? Write or have code written everyday? I am one and for me and everyone I know AI has been mostly just a (fantastic) replacement for google search.
        reverius42 5mo ago
        > took an enormous amount of hand holding There's a big difference between "not writing any code by hand" (which still might involve lots of non-manual-coding effort!), and "vibecoding", and as I understand this thread was about the former. edit: yes, I'm a software developer, and if I have a change in mind larger than 2 lines I've been using Claude Code (with English input) rather than a text editor to do it, since about January.
- D-Machine 5mo ago
  GP posting "Everyone I personally know working in software stopped writing code" on HN is such an obvious tell of blinkered delusion. Literally all HN talks about is AI these days, and it is very, very clear that plenty of people are still writing lots of code, many finding AI makes them slower and causes more problems, and many making the reverse claims. There is always a rich mix of opinions and experiences here. You would have to believe that literally everyone on HN is a bot (and also everyone on Reddit, Twitter, astralcodexten, or anywhere else online) to discount all these differing opinions in favor of "everyone I personally know" .
- llbbdd 5mo ago
  If you can describe the code you want to write, AI can write it exactly the way you would have, but faster than you every time. That is the floor now.

threethirtytwo 5mo ago

YOU still write code. I would say over 65-70% of modern programmers no longer write code. The paradigm shift happened within the last 365 days.

esailija 5mo ago
65-70% "programmers" never wrote code in the first place. Before AI cargo culters just copy pasted code from tutorials, stack overflow, github and so on. With AI they merely continue not writing code. Some people didn't do anything, not even copy paste, see r/overemployed although I have not checked it after AI... maybe it's no longer possible to hold a dev job without actually doing anything. Programmers still write code. They have enough expertise from actually programming to understand that the untouched output from AI is not good enough to be professionally responsible for.
- threethirtytwo 5mo ago
  No. You can't get very far copying and pasting from stack overflow. I'm talking about legit programmers which are around 90% imho. Out of those programmers 65-70% no longer write code.
user43928 5mo ago
At work I still write code, but at home I don't think I wrote anything in months. There's nothing that I can't tell Claude Opus or GPT 5.5 to do for me instead. At work, where I don't have cheap AI subscriptions, access to the SOTA, and where code needs to follow conventions more strictly, I still have to write the code by hand often.