“Junior” is the wrong distinction to make. I’ve recently worked with senior engineers who are terrible at wielding agents, and recent grad engineers who multiple themselves 100x. The main way I look for software engineers now are:

- Deep curiosity and ability to absorb new information quickly - Evidence of ability to wield and coordinate agents to the max - Ability to clearly communicate ideas

You have these skills, you can conquer the software world.

As obvious as it seems to say, with no new juniors there will be no new seniors.

This just can't be sustainable. Ever increasing agent activity can only move to the point where it's literally impossible for humans to have a collective awareness of how the systems that support our lives actually work. How does anyone think this is going to end well? If as humans we loose control of vital systems, when they stop working one day (and they so easily could unless the agents are perfect and 100pct aligned with the general good of humanity (how do we even define that)) we could find ourselves without the ability to run healthcare systems and power grids, that have evolved so much such complexity that no human can intervene to fix them. I do believe that you can create feed back loops where probabilistic agents can be used to create deterministic checks and balances, and solve real problems for good. But it's a wild west at the moment and that is not what's happening in so many companies, and the solutions are not yet on the horizon. Even if the 'agents can handle it' ... where does that leave us? Unable to run our societies without puting everything through frontier LLMs? I just finished a very short story by Ted Chiang - 'The evolution of Human science' it starts at the point where it's 25 years since humans contributed a scientific paper because 'meta humans' now handle all research, and communicate digitally such that humans can only get a low fidelity report of what the agents actually know, and the endeavour to understand has become like a best effort archeological like hobby for interested humans. The story assumes that the 'meta humans' will always act in humans best interests. I believe it's from 2002, it's incredibly precient (The stories of your life and others is the collection the story is in. Many of them are very relevant to modern AI actually).

One should keep in mind that whatever anthropic discovers there is a discovery made by a company with an infinite cash and hype faucet.

So while some stuff may transfer over as a general thing, a lot will probably not.

Still interesting, of course, but to be consumed with a mountain of salt.

The issue with this kind of report is that you inevitably end up thinking "They would say that, would they".

There simply is no way to separate what’s reporting and what’s advertising.

> Part of this shift is the natural expansion of business functions as the company scales.

Every R&D company on the planet has this cycle. Hire lots of developers and researchers. Build product market fit. Lay off all but essential personnel, while increasing the amount of sales and operations stuff as much as possible.

Anthropic this isn’t novel or unique in any way. Stop pretending your AI wonder machines are the reason why. This analysis lacks ANY comparison to other non AI research company hiring cycles. Do your homework please, this is pretty embarrassing.

Authors of this article: Nathan Wilmers, Regina Catipon, Maxim Massenkoff, Peter McCrory

I'm too lazy to bother looking up each of their credentials. Are any of them software engineers? Do they know anything about creating, maintaining, and evolving software?

I do know that Anthropic's CEO isn't a software engineer, so it would be hard for him to evaluate their claims with any deep insight from experience.

They present and immediately take away their own value proposition. Do AI CEOs also buy tokens, or is that the reason for human employees ?

>"One possibility is single-person startups, each with a human founder steering swarms of agents to rake in billions in revenue. Another is companies built by AI genius CEOs employing human agents only to wield pipettes and testify before Congress."

Doesn’t sound too disruptive yet, except for juniors and those who have invested in very specific skills e.g. performance. But this happened in two years. What’s going to happen over the coming two years?

One data point I’d be interested to know more about is if they’ve scaled back their hiring due to AI productivity gains, or if they’re just doing more engineering for the same money. As I see it that’s the big question for those of us who have to work for a living.

Wow, that sounds like an AI hellscape! Constant pressure to use AI agents to be more productive. That pressure requires an amount of attention that wears you out so quickly just to stay competitive that you need to build bespoke tools to orchestrate your agentic workflows. But the amount of output from that is too much too, so you need to build meta-orchestrators to orchestrate your orchestrators.

And all of this is then somehow classified as responsible development of AI, by people who claim AI could eradicate humanity, and that RSI will be our downfall. How exactly is outsourcing your work on agents to agents not RSI at this point? Why are these people still allowed to operate again?

This is a good HN discussion, but the post itself reads like advertising for their IPO. LOokt at us! We’re living the new high efficiency future and we’re building it too so buy the stock!

I wonder how complex the prompt was to write this.

> As AI agents diffused through the company, Anthropic began producing more code per person

Anyone who has been in software for a while should hear alarm bells going off when they read this. Every line of code is a liability, not a trophy. This is what happens when people who don't know and don't care to learn about the existing body of knowledge in a discipline "reinvent" it.

Give it another year or two and Anthropic will be writing all about how they lowered LOC and got agents to be more conservative about generating new code and introduced a "verification gate" for every new line produced.

Who cares how employment is changing at your startup? You're like an influencer on TikTok marching shit from your bedroom, pretending to have a fabulous and glamorous life. Minewhile, you are insecure, incompetent in the craft of software engineering, but play the social media influencer game because you have zero substance.

It really is the most misanthropic company, isn't it? But strategically is all this fearmongering about SWEs becoming obsolete even the right move for Anthropic?

Say that it is borderline true (it's not, but let's pretend). Then companies can lay off 90 devs for every 100, and buy the remaining 10 devs Claude subscriptions. Isn't it better if they keep all 100 and buy everyone a Claude sub?

So shouldn't Anthropic actually be pushing the narrative that Claude doesn't replace devs but actually makes them vastly better at their jobs and so every company, big and small, should buy every dev the highest tier Claude enterprise subscription?

Recently claude on vscode got blanked for whole day, Fixed after the update on next day

Anthropic's hiring practices are rife with problems, potentially dangerous, and the expected value of interviewing there is very low.

Problem one: extreme subjective bias in candidate evaluation. Anthropic has a litany of red flag deal-killers they are evaluating for. They are subjective and not validated by any kind of scientific evaluation. Charitably, it is benign cargo-cultism (similar to being "un-Googley" from back in the day); uncharitably it is just voodoo. Interviewers use this to kill candidate loops via conscious and unconscious bias. Typically an interviewer will note one or more potential issues which can kill the loop (all candidates will say something which can be considered problematic in their interview; the potential problem space is infinite). If the interviewer likes the candidate, they will ask a follow-up question which allows the candidate to redeem themselves. If they dislike the candidate, they will ask questions which only probe for potential red flags and will not continue, or end the interview, before the candidate can reveal the redeeming half of their story. Probe until negative evidence is uncovered, and then a) continue to probe or b) terminate early, depending on the preexisting bias for the candidate.

Problem two: ghost jobs. Anthropic maintains an evergreen list of open positions that they never hire into, even senior ones. This is due to a few reasons: a) they are holding out for the ideal candidate, basically a god in human form. But that is only the reason they give themselves as to why they reject almost all candidates which make it through their loops. The real reason is b) existing employees and managers do not want another peer to collaborate with, instead what they really want is more agents for them to command. It's an intoxicating feeling and much preferred over in-person interaction. With fewer employees, it's more scope and power for the existing ones. It's well known in certain circles that interviewing there is a waste of time. It's ironic that they claim to love humanity but actively dislike actual humans.

Problem three: extreme dependence on agents for daily operations. Because they don't hire enough humans for the reasons above, they are outgunned and completely dependent on AI to operate. If AI were shown to be problematic or dangerous, they must still keep running it internally. Thus, they have no control. They are structurally compromised by AI; they don't have the capacity to put humans back into the loop. AI has already left the box and the box has been dismantled.

I would love to see productivity effects in revenues/profits and risk (how much more revenue/profit per head, for example) - in the end commits etc. aren't quite enough.

They're celebrating elimination of junior work while offering no explanation for how future senior staff are trained, and measuring output by code volume. Lol who wrote this, can't wait to see how this plays out, if you asked even a junior they could have told you that's a terrible idea.

Said by a company that’s increasingly desperate to convince you that there’s serious business value in using their product. The challenge is those without that conflict of interests don’t seem to agree there’s a lot of ROI.

In other news, Turkey farmers encourage you to buy more turkey for Thanksgiving.

At some point AI labs will start benchmarking their latest models by the number of humans they still have working in their companies.

am i the only one who read this and thought 'no shit.' obviously agent hours outnumber human hours? most people operate multiple agents and function as AI nannies now. big deal.

also 'lines of code' or any other output based metric in the age of infinite slop is not a flex/indicator of usefulness or value.

and yes, everyone spends all their time reading Claude output. that doesn't mean better work is getting done, or progress is being made. i've been reviewing and fixing claude slop at work for at least a year. if anything companies/products are getting more homogonized and bloated. thanks anthropic, you are going to save the world

how we will get next generation seniors, if no body hire juniors and freshers?

As if Anthropic was a model of successful company...

They are nowhere near profitable, have terribly bad products riddled with bugs (9,000+ open reports on Claude Code), and have no moat. Why would anyone listen to how they work internally?

It's 2026 and people still believe in measuring productivity by lines of code^W^W^Wnumber of commits? Amazing.

Two vibecoders are walking down a forest path.

One of them spots a Zig codebase and challenges the other: “I'll give you $100 to convert this codebase to Rust!”. They accept and after spending $1000 worth of tokens on a thousand commits the codebase is now in Rust.

On the way back, the second vibecoder spots the same codebase again, and challenges back: “I'll give you $100 to convert this codebase to Zig!”. Another gajillion tokens later, the codebase is now in Zig.

Walking a little more, one vibecoder (in a moment of unusual clarity) asks the other: “It feels like we just did this for nothing”. “No”, the other responds, ”we just increased our company productivity by two thousand commits per day!”.

Is it just me that wonders if everyone having "an army of Claudes" is an unsustainable token burn for anyone not affiliated with a Frontier Lab?

> Anthropic has been hiring for a smaller share of junior technical positions.

I don't wanna be the guy calling out the lie or slop but when did Anthropic hire in the last two years for junior roles? OAI and Anthropic could literally hire seamlessly the best of the best worldwide for every job they advertise without having the need to think about the poor juniors.

it just says same things everyone knows entry level job gone , ai does everything , agentic infra nothing new to take from here

I'm surprised this is not much more talked about these days. The hiring bar is going to increase so much in the next few years (already happening), and together with more layoffs driven by big tech, things aren't looking good.

Anyhropic is not a good example for anything. Their scale and growth is way beyond what like 99% of companies experiece. Their optimization formula is different.

I hope they understand that those "essays" are long past due date of being remotely interesting.

it was interesting in the beginning when there was technical substance, but now its just techno-bros vision of deep thoughts

> A financial manager built a purchase request review agent

> An executive assistant, who built a personal assistant agent for scheduling and email triage

Really? We should build our own agents for everything? Sounds a bit token-spendy.

Also, as far as I can make out, the paper was not written by AI (nor even with AI assistance?). You'd think they'd make a song and dance about it if it was. Maybe AI can't do this sort of thing yet (or ever).

[flagged]

Most comments are lazy.

“Anthropic bad because automation of labour”

“Claude bad because it hallucinated that one time”

“This is a marketing post to hype up ipo numbers”