“Dead By The End Of The Year” - Musk Predicts AI WIPES OUT Coding Jobs

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
So, you're saying with Hilton Honors, I can use points for a free night stay anywhere?

**Tom** (0:04)
Anywhere.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:06)
What about fancy places like the Canopy in Paris? Yeah, Hilton Honors, baby. Or relaxing sanctuaries like the Conrad and Tulum?

**SPEAKER_3** (0:13)
Hilton Honors, baby.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:15)
What about the five-star Waldorf Astoria in the Maldives? Are you gonna do this for all 9,000 properties?

**SPEAKER_4** (0:22)
When you want points that can take you anywhere, anytime, it matters where you stay. Hilton for the stay.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:28)
So Elon Musk comes out and says coding was a top job for decades. It will be dead by the end of the year. This is what Elon, and by the end of the year, we're talking about six months from now.
Rob, do you have this clip? Yep. Go for it.

**Elon Musk** (0:40)
I think actually things will move maybe even by the end of this year to where you don't even bother doing coding, the AI just creates the binary directly, and the AI can create a much more efficient binary than can be done by any compiler. So, just say, create optimized binary for this particular outcome, and you actually bypass even traditional coding.
That's an intermediate step that actually will not be needed, probably by, I'd say, the end of this year.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:10)
And by the way, when he's saying this, people are reacting saying, what are you talking about? Check this out. Anthropix New Paper adds fuel to the fire, published when AI builds itself on Friday, and the numbers caught the attention of Tesla, Microsoft Watchers alike as of May. Ready?
More than 80% of code merged into Anthropix codebase was authored by Claude. Let me say one more time. More than 80% of code merged into Anthropix codebase was authored by Claude up from low single digits before Claude code launched in February of 2025 We're talking about less than a year and a half. Tom, your reaction to what Elon just said here.

**Tom** (1:53)
We've been seeing this coming for a while. But what's interesting is we've also seen the analysis that says the number of job openings for software engineers has been increasing. Well, wait a minute. What does that software engineer do?
Are they basically performing DevOps functions? Are they more like product leaders? Is that what they're doing? But the individual coding is happening through the AI engine. And that's the reconciliation I'm looking forward to, to understanding that. Because on one hand, they're saying coding, but there's more to software engineering than just the coding, right? There's all of the application build, the outcome, the human interaction, you're getting all the feedback on there. And then you've got the product people. So AI can do all that in some form and more, but I think what we're really talking about is like, that was in that phone call they were talking about you were talking about, that was an existing application that existed, that what was happening in the background with AI was basically optimization, correct?

**SPEAKER_6** (3:00)
Absolutely.

**Tom** (3:01)
Right, so you already had a customer construct and you had a customer need and you had a person from the company on the phone, AI is listening and giving you a bid optimization on the fly.
So that's where I see the speed. So I don't think this is the death of software engineering, but I do think that if you're a coder and you're working 12 hours a day and you were just hands on keyboards, as they say, I think that class of people, that's where it's going. And I want to see where all those jobs right now, because the number of job openings for software engineers is up big percent over last year. I want to know, okay, when the dust clears, what are all these people doing? Are they really the product leads and ideation and working on the customer side? Because what Musk is saying is, they're not going to be the fingers coding.

**SPEAKER_6** (3:51)
This is very normal, right? If you go back, there used to be entire buildings full of people doing computations. They literally were settling the books. They were writing down the physical ledger. What is the revenue? What are the expenses? And you would have floors and floors of people. Now Excel does all of that. And so if you were to look at the percentage of computations that occur inside of a business, 80, 90 percent of them are all done in some sort of technology or automated fashion, right?
So of course, code going that way, it feels crazy when you're kind of living through it, but it's like the first time somebody saw Excel, you know, and so maybe a pivot table, they probably had their mind blown like, oh my God, it's gonna take everyone's job. The truth is that actually just made everyone more productive. And so Box CEO, Aaron Levy, he had a great post about the impact of AI on jobs recently. He said that the jobs data coming out continues to suggest the opposite of what a lot of people thought would happen. And his example that he uses as an engineer, which Tom is talking about. He says, as the prime example of the area where greatest AI impact happens in engineering, most companies now have far more software projects than ever because of AI, and effectively only engineers are gonna be the ones doing the work. So you would think that wait, AI is supposed to be replacing the engineers, right? He goes, no, you can get by for a while by being non-technical building software, but eventually someone has to understand what the thing is that got built, right? He says, somebody's gotta maintain it. They gotta fix the security issues that come up. They gotta upgrade the systems and so on. That's all jobs. And so you can go and you can vibe code things, but if you vibe code it and then something breaks, sure, could you go ask the AI? Yeah, and it'll fix some aspects of it, but then how do you integrate it to your existing business or your existing system?