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Credit...Illustration by Pablo Delcan and Danielle Del Plato
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Coding After Coders: The End of Computer Programming as We Know It

In the era of A.I. agents, many Silicon Valley programmers are now
barely programming. Instead, what they're doing is deeply, deeply
weird.

Credit...Illustration by Pablo Delcan and Danielle Del Plato

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By Clive Thompson

Clive Thompson interviewed more than 70 software developers at
Google, Amazon, Microsoft and small start-ups. He is the author of
"Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World."

  * March 12, 2026

Lately, Manu Ebert has been trying to keep his A.I. from humiliating
him.

I recently visited Ebert, a machine-learning engineer and former
neuroscientist, at the spare apartment where he and Conor
Brennan-Burke run their start-up, Hyperspell. Ebert, a tall and
short-bearded 39-year-old with the air of a European academic, sat
before a mammoth curved monitor. Onscreen, Claude Code -- the A.I.
tool from Anthropic -- was busy at work. One of its agents was writing
a new feature and another was testing it; a third supervised
everything, like a virtual taskmaster. After a few minutes, Claude
flashed: "Implementation complete!"

Listen to this article, read by James Patrick Cronin

Ebert grew up in the '90s, learning to code the old-fashioned way: He
typed it out, line by painstaking line. After college, he held jobs
as a software developer in Silicon Valley for companies like Airbnb
before becoming a co-founder of four start-ups. Back then, developing
software meant spending days hunched over his keyboard, pondering
gnarly details, trying to avoid mistakes.

All that ended last fall. A.I. had become so good at writing code
that Ebert, initially cautious, began letting it do more and more.
Now Claude Code does the bulk of it. The agents are so fast -- and
generally so accurate -- that when a customer recently needed
Hyperspell to write some new code, it took only half an hour. In the
before times? "That alone would have taken me a day," he said.

He and Brennan-Burke, who is 32, are still software developers, but
like most of their peers now, they only rarely write code. Instead,
they spend their days talking to the A.I., describing in plain
English what they want from it and responding to the A.I.'s "plan"
for what it will do. Then they turn the agents loose.

A.I. being A.I., things occasionally go haywire. Sometimes when
Claude misbehaves and fails to test the code, Ebert scolds the agent:
Claude, you really do have to run all the tests.

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