After calling software engineering ‘dead,’ Anthropic’s Claude Code creator Boris Cherny says coding tools like Microsoft VS Code, Apple Xcode, and others will be ‘dead soon’ – The Times of India
Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code, thinks the tools developers have relied on for decades are on borrowed time. Having already predicted that the software engineer job title will “start to go away” this year, Cherny is now pointing his finger at the tools of the trade. He believes coding environments like Microsoft’s VS Code and Apple’s Xcode will become obsolete as AI agents grow capable enough to handle the entire development workflow themselves.“There’s a good chance by end of year people aren’t using IDEs anymore,” Cherny said during a recent talk at Anthropic, responding to a question about why Claude Code was built as a terminal-based CLI rather than a full IDE. “We want to get ready for this future and avoid over-investing in UI on top, given the way models are progressing. It just may not be useful work pretty soon.”
Why Anthropic skipped the GUI entirely
The decision to build Claude Code around the terminal wasn’t just practical—it was a bet on where the industry is heading. Cherny noted that engineers at Anthropic use a wide range of IDEs, from VS Code and Zed to Xcode, Vim, and Emacs, making the terminal the lowest common denominator. But the deeper reasoning was about model velocity: the team could see firsthand how fast Claude was improving, and didn’t want to build UI scaffolding that might be redundant within months.Claude Code is already fully agentic, capable of writing entire features, fixing bugs, and navigating sprawling codebases across multiple files without hand-holding. Cherny says he hasn’t manually edited a single line of code since November.
Antrophic ’s Claude Code creator says there won’t be software engineers but ‘builders’
The IDE prediction follows Cherny’s broader thesis, which he laid out on Lenny’s Podcast last month, that the role of software engineer is itself being redefined. Everyone will code, he said, but the job title will be replaced by something closer to “builder”—a generalist who orchestrates AI rather than writing line-by-line.Anthropic’s own 2026 Agentic Coding Trends Report backs this up. It finds that while engineers use AI in roughly 60% of their work, only 0–20% of tasks are truly “fully delegated.” The human role is shifting toward architecture, oversight, and strategic judgment—not disappearing, but fundamentally changing shape.Cherny acknowledged the disruption won’t be comfortable. “It’s going to be painful for a lot of people,” he said. His advice to workers navigating the shift: experiment early, stay curious, and resist the urge to wait for things to stabilize. “Don’t be scared of them. Just dive in.”The question of what happens next, he added, isn’t one Anthropic alone should answer. “As a society, this is a conversation we have to figure out together.”