Claude Code Hits $2.5B ARR: Is "Software Engineer" About to Become an Obsolete Title?

Boris Cherny, Head of Claude Code at Anthropic, posted a thread on X walking through his daily workflow. The numbers were staggering: 8.5 million views, 49,000 likes, 6,400 reposts. What made it viral wasn't hype—it was specificity.

Here's what caught everyone off guard: Cherny doesn't have a CS degree. He studied economics at UC San Diego, dropped out to start his first company at 18, and rose to Principal Engineer (IC8) at Meta before joining Anthropic. Claude Code itself started as a side project inside Anthropic's internal "Bell Labs" division. CEO Dario Amodei was so surprised by organic adoption that he asked Cherny: "Hey, are you forcing engineers to use this? Why is everyone using it?"

Now Cherny runs five parallel Claude sessions in numbered terminal tabs. Each team at Anthropic maintains a CLAUDE.md file in their git repos—a living document of mistakes so the AI improves over time. He revealed that "pretty much 100%" of code across Anthropic is now AI-generated. Not AI-assisted. AI-generated. And 4% of all public GitHub commits are now authored by Claude Code, with projections of 20%+ by year-end.

Then came the prediction. On the YC Lightcone podcast, Cherny said: "I think today coding is practically solved. I think we're going to start to see the title of software engineer go away. And I think it's just going to be maybe 'builder,' maybe 'product manager.'" He acknowledged the human cost too: "It's going to be painful."

When Jensen Huang called Claude Code "incredible" and a senior Google engineer said it recreated a year's worth of work in an hour, that wasn't marketing. It was confirmation of something indie hackers already feel: the barrier between "idea" and "product" is collapsing.

Fortune reported that people with zero programming experience have used Claude Code to book theater tickets, file taxes, and monitor tomato plants. One indie hacker, Sebastian Volkis, used AI coding tools to build TrendFeed in 4 days and hit $12K revenue in the first month. Cameron quit his job, built a product, and exploded to $62K MRR in under 90 days.

Here's the reframe: the same tools that make "software engineer" obsolete make "software entrepreneur" more accessible than ever. If code is no longer the bottleneck, what is? Problem identification. Distribution. Domain expertise. Taste. These are the skills indie hackers already have.

Not everyone is buying the hype. Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu warned that AI coding will "pile up tech debt faster and faster until the whole thing collapses." Red Hat published a widely-discussed piece on February 17 titled "The Uncomfortable Truth About Vibe Coding," arguing that "trust, unlike code, cannot be vibed into existence."

The data supports caution. A study by nonprofit research org METR found that while experienced developers believed AI made them 20% faster, objective tests showed they were actually 19% slower. Studies show 48% of AI-generated code contains security vulnerabilities. And when Klarna replaced 700 employees with AI, quality declined so badly that customers revolted and the company had to rehire humans. Forrester now predicts 55% of companies that laid off workers for AI will quietly bring them back.

The truth is somewhere in the middle. "Software engineer" isn't dying—it's evolving. The title may change, but the need for someone who understands systems, security, and architecture isn't going anywhere. What is dying is the idea that you need to manually write every line. The role is shifting from "code writer" to "code director."

Claude Code's trajectory from $1B to $2.5B ARR in months isn't slowing down. Claude 5 is expected soon. GPT-5.3 Codex is already optimized for end-to-end coding workflows. Multi-agent coding—where AI sessions collaborate with each other—is becoming the norm at companies like Anthropic.

The r/vibecoding subreddit has passed 87,000 members. Cursor, Lovable, bolt.new, and Replit are all racing to capture the same insight: the future of software isn't about writing code, it's about directing it.

For indie hackers, the play is clear. Don't fight this shift—ride it. The founders who win in 2026 won't be the best coders. They'll be the ones who identify the best problems, ship the fastest, and build distribution that AI can't replicate.