Anthropic cofounder says AI is making junior engineers' value 'a bit more dubious'
ANTHONY WALLACE/AFP via Getty Images
- An Anthropic cofounder said AI now writes most of its code and could hit 99% by year's end.
- Cofounder Jack Clark said it's making junior engineers' value "a bit more dubious."
- Senior engineers with "well-calibrated intuitions" are in higher demand as AI rises, he said.
At Anthropic, the rise of its AI coding tool is already reshaping hiring.
Cofounder Jack Clark says the value of junior talent is now "a bit more dubious" inside the company, while seasoned engineers are becoming more important.
"Something that we found is that the value of more senior people with really, really well-calibrated intuitions and taste is going up," Clark said on an episode of "The Ezra Klein Show" on Tuesday.
The company's large language model Claude is already writing "comfortably the majority" of Anthropic's code, he added.
His bet, he said, is that it could hit 99% of the company's coding by the end of the year "if things speed up really aggressively."
As AI takes over coding, humans move up the stack
The shift doesn't mean Anthropic is shrinking its engineering ranks, as several other tech companies have done with AI.
Clark confirmed that there are more people with software engineering skills working at Anthropic today than there were two years ago.
As Business Insider's Alastair Barr recently noted, Anthropic's careers page lists at least 100 software engineer roles it is trying to fill.
But what those engineers do — and what kind of engineers the company prioritizes — is changing.
As Claude Code takes on more of the implementation work, the bottleneck moves up the stack.
"There are still certain roles where you want to bring in younger people, but an issue that we're staring at is: Wow, the really basic tasks Claude Code or our coding systems can do. What we need is someone with tons of experience," Clark said.
Clark said he views it as an "O-ring automation," where as one part of a workflow becomes automated, humans flood toward whatever remains slow or difficult — improving it, then potentially automating that too.
Clark suggested that this shift could have implications beyond Anthropic.
"The distribution is changing," he said — not necessarily in head count, but in where value sits.