Software Industry "Crash"? No -- Anthropic Is Turning Programmers into Product Managers

February brought an $830 billion bloodbath to software stocks on Wall Street. HubSpot cratered 39%. Figma plunged 40%. Atlassian and Shopify weren't spared either. The catalyst? Anthropic's Claude Code and Cowork.

Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code, didn't mince words: "By the end of this year, everyone will be a product manager. Everyone will write code. The title 'software engineer' will disappear." Even more striking: 100% of the code at Anthropic is now AI-generated, and Cherny himself hasn't manually touched a single line since last November.

But let's take a breath. Is this really a "crash"? The data tells a more nuanced story: developers use AI in 60% of their work, yet tasks that can be fully handed off to AI still account for less than 20%. In other words, AI is boosting productivity -- but we're nowhere close to making humans redundant.

Here's the richest irony: while prophesying the extinction of software engineers, Anthropic is simultaneously hiring software engineers in droves. So which is it -- an AI revolution, or just another round of the tech industry crying wolf?

My take: the software industry isn't crashing. It's shapeshifting. The barrier to writing code has dropped, but the value of knowing what to build and why has only gone up. Programmers aren't going anywhere -- but the ones whose only skill is writing code? They should be nervous.