---
type: entity
subtype: person
title: "Dario Amodei"
description: "CEO of Anthropic, cited as the highest-profile source of the 'AI will write 90% of code' and 'software engineers go extinct in 2026' predictions Cole pushes back on."
tags: [anthropic, ai-predictions, career]
videos: [is-software-engineering-finally-dead]
created: 2026-07-21
updated: 2026-07-21
---

# Dario Amodei

Dario Amodei is the CEO of [Anthropic](../organizations/anthropic.md) and, in this catalog, the name attached to the loudest version of the "software engineering is dead" claim. Cole opens with him by the numbers: "he went on the record March of last year saying that AI would be writing 90% of code in 6 months" ([0:00:16]), and then escalated to "saying that software engineers could go extinct this year in 2026 and it's going to be painful for a lot of people" ([0:00:31]). Amodei is not a straw man here. He is the strongest-credentialed proponent of the position, which is exactly why Cole treats the prediction as the thing to argue against rather than ignore.

The rebuttal has two halves. First, incentives: Cole groups Amodei with Jensen Huang and Sam Altman as leaders who are both biased and living in a bubble, and tells you to follow the money from Anthropic's jump to a $380B valuation. Second, data: 90% of engineering teams "use AI" but only 51% of professional developers use it daily, 76% of executives believe their teams have embraced AI versus 52% of engineers, and 21% of AI licenses go underutilized. Real enterprise adoption is throttled by procurement, security review, and skeptical senior engineers, not by model capability.

Where Cole concedes ground is on coding specifically. Agents genuinely are strong enough to write most of the code, which is why his counter-position is not "the prediction is wrong" but "the prediction is about the wrong job." That is [The Evolving Role of the Software Engineer](../../concepts/evolving-role-of-the-engineer.md): the human keeps requirements, architecture, orchestration, and review, and the craft moves up the stack from [Prompt Engineering](../../concepts/prompt-engineering.md) to [Context Engineering](../../concepts/context-engineering.md) to [Intent Engineering](../../concepts/intent-engineering.md). Amodei's own company's tool, [Claude Code](../tools/claude-code.md), is the thing Cole runs inside [The PIV Loop](../../concepts/the-piv-loop.md) while staying in the driver's seat for planning and validation.

## Works with

- [Anthropic](../organizations/anthropic.md) - Maker of Claude and Claude Code, creator of MCP, and Cole's pick for the best coding LLM.
- [Claude Code](../tools/claude-code.md) - Anthropic's terminal-based agentic coding assistant.
- [Boris Cherny](./boris-cherny.md) - Creator of Claude Code whose 'coding is largely solved' remark was widely misread; he clarified that great engineers matter more than ever.

## Contrasts with

- [The Evolving Role of the Software Engineer](../../concepts/evolving-role-of-the-engineer.md) - The argument that software engineering is not dying but shifting as agents absorb the typing.
- [Human in the Loop](../../concepts/human-in-the-loop.md) - Keeping a human as the approver and steerer of agentic work rather than fully automating.

## Related

- [The Evolution of AI Coding](../../concepts/the-evolution-of-ai-coding.md) - How AI coding assistants moved from novelty to daily driver, and where the landscape, adoption, and commentary are heading.
- [Intent Engineering](../../concepts/intent-engineering.md) - Shifting the engineer's job from writing code to precisely expressing intent that an AI agent implements.
- [Context Engineering](../../concepts/context-engineering.md) - The deliberate practice of curating exactly what goes into an LLM's limited context window.
- [The PIV Loop](../../concepts/the-piv-loop.md) - Cole's core agentic-coding cycle of Plan, Implement, Validate.
- [Vibe Coding](../../concepts/vibe-coding.md) - Building software by conversationally prompting an AI without closely reading the code, useful for prototypes but risky for production.
- [Cole Medin](./cole-medin.md) - AI engineer and educator whose YouTube channel and Dynamous community teach agentic coding.

## Sources

- [Is Software Engineering Finally Dead?](../../sources/is-software-engineering-finally-dead.md) - "[0:00:16] he went on the record March of last year saying that AI would be writing 90% of code in 6 months."
- [Is Software Engineering Finally Dead?](../../sources/is-software-engineering-finally-dead.md) - "[0:00:31] saying that software engineers could go extinct this year in 2026 and it's going to be painful for a lot of people."
