Tech CEOs say the era of 'code by AI' is here. Some software engineers are skeptical

toggle caption Jenni Sohn/Associated Press

Tech CEOs are making ambitious claims about AI's coding capabilities. In March, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said "we'll be there in three to six months — where AI is writing 90% of the code." Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg predicted in April that for one project "in the next year probably…maybe half the development is going to be done by AI." Executives of Amazon, Google and Microsoft have also highlighted large language models' (LLMs') abilities to generate code.

AI tools have changed how coding works for some developers and there are now fewer of the most junior software engineers. But despite the dramatic rhetoric, AI in software engineering might not mean a new age of automation.

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After months of sitting on the sidelines, software engineer Colton Voege finally tried out AI tools for his work. He remembered watching a podcast where leaders of tech startup incubator Y Combinator – which helped Voege launch a company - touted AI's "incredible productivity".

"It kind of confirmed what I already felt about it, in that it's really good at shortcutting certain things," Voege said. "[AI] is great for writing little tools that you'll use once and then throw away." But he hasn't seen evid