Boris Cherny wants you to know that the era of the keyboard-clacking coder is over. At Anthropic, the manual line of code is already a relic of the past, replaced by autonomous agents that handle the heavy lifting. But while the tech world is currently obsessed with the term "vibe coding," the man who helped pioneer this shift is already over the terminology.
The Post-Code Reality at Anthropic
Cherny, the architect behind Claude Code, has been on a bit of a warpath lately regarding the future of the profession. His message is blunt: software engineering as we knew it is dead. According to Cherny, no one at Anthropic has manually touched a line of code since at least November 2025. Instead, they operate in a world where AI instances communicate autonomously over Slack to resolve cross-team bugs and deploy features.
In this new paradigm, the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is the next domino to fall. If you aren't writing the logic yourself, why do you need a complex text editor? For Cherny, the role of the developer has fundamentally shifted from a logic-writer to something more akin to a high-level product manager or an orchestrator of intent.
Why ‘Vibe Coding’ Doesn’t Pass the Vibe Check
Despite being a poster child for this transition, Cherny is pushing back against the viral phrase "vibe coding." Coined by OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy, the term describes a workflow where a developer describes a "vibe" or a concept, and the AI manifests the functional software. While it’s catchy—and was even named a word of the year—Cherny finds it a bit too glib for a revolution involving billions of dollars in infrastructure.
He’s currently searching for a more professional alternative. He’s toyed with "agentic engineering," another Karpathy-ism, though he admits it lacks the same cultural ring. Anthropic’s official documentation currently leans toward "agentic coding tools." The goal is to find a term that respects the technical complexity of the underlying models while acknowledging that the human’s job is now about managing high-level goals rather than syntax.
The Road Ahead
Whether we call it vibe coding or agentic engineering, the transition is undeniable. Cherny warns that this could be the last year where traditional software training holds its historical value. As we move toward a future where AI handles the implementation, the real skill won’t be knowing where the semicolons go—it’ll be knowing exactly what to ask for.
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