For Software Engineers, the AI Reckoning Has Already Arrived

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:08)
You're listening to Bloomberg Businessweek with Carol Massar and Tim Stenovec on Bloomberg Radio.

**Carol Massar** (0:14)
All right. So we kind of want to stick with AI and trying to get to, I mean, it's part of almost every story that we get to. And a fascinating story, it's a most read on the Bloomberg, it's by our Businessweek team about how the reality of AI and its impact, AI reckoning, you might say, has already arrived for software engineers. And we want to get to this story. Mark Millian wrote it. He's Bloomberg Businessweek Deputy Editor, joining Tim and me right here in studio. You know, we talk about, first of all, great story. Loved it. We caught our attention this morning on our read-in.
We talk about ROI and productivity gains. Coders, software engineers, they're already feeling the impact of what AI can do for their world. Maybe there's an upside, maybe there's a downside. But walk us through what's going on.

**Mark Milian** (0:59)
Yeah, I used to live in San Francisco. I covered the tech industry for more than 15 years.
I'm living here now, working on Businessweek, but I had just been hearing for the last six months from sources and old friends out there that this is like the biggest thing that's happened in their industry in at least 20 years. I felt like I just had to go out there and see and just really understand what was going on. Because you hear a lot of doomers talking about how AI is going to take all the jobs, and here they're saying that because it's taking their job, or it's at least drastically changing their jobs. So I went into Anthropic and OpenAI, spent time at the labs and just met with people who have been doing this their whole adult lives. Learning to code, coding, and now they're not writing code anymore. They're just having conversations with Claude.

**Tim Stenovec** (1:53)
Meaning they're vibe coding or something different?

**Mark Milian** (1:56)
Well, vibe coding.

**Tim Stenovec** (1:57)
Because there's not necessarily a name for this.

**Mark Milian** (1:59)
Yeah. They look at it as a little of a derogatory term.

**Tim Stenovec** (2:02)
So that's more elementary. That's for the folks like me who don't actually know how to code.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:06)
Exactly.

**Tim Stenovec** (2:06)
Okay.

**Mark Milian** (2:07)
So there have been different terms for it. Most of them just call it coding, even though they're not actually writing the code themselves. But yeah, it's like basically telling it what you would have spent the next six hours doing. It's like, here's how I want the app to be structured.

**Tim Stenovec** (2:24)
Okay. So then what do they spend the six hours doing now?

**Mark Milian** (2:26)
They spend the six hours building 10 different features for their app. So they'll open separate windows and saying, you work on this, you work on this, you work on that. It's sort of like a product manager which is a job that exists. But those people don't have people who are going to produce things as quickly, within 10 minutes that would take a person a couple of days.

**Carol Massar** (2:49)
Mark, tell us about Boris Cherny out in San Francisco. He created the software Claude Code, runs it at Anthropic, and in your reporting, you say that at Anthropic, the expectation that everybody is at least a little bit of a coder has become endemic, and that mindset is beginning to infect much of the tech industry. Tell us a little bit more about, I'm assuming you chatted with him, you talked with him.

**Mark Milian** (3:08)
Yeah, I spent a bunch of time with Boris. He's a really interesting guy. He's like a coder's coder, and so he's like a little bit of a guru that people follow him on their podcasts and his ex-posts to figure out how is my job going to change tomorrow? Anthropic is releasing stuff almost every single day. But he has a long background in the industry. He was the leader of code quality at Meta. So he set the standards for how Meta developed Facebook and Instagram and worked on the server architecture and Instagram.
He's just articulated what this new world looks like, and it's changing even for him every week. Instead of actually telling it what to do, now he just creates this broad framework for his AI and just go spend the next several days working on this challenge.

**Tim Stenovec** (4:00)
What does this mean for what we've seen with the talent pipeline in Silicon Valley over the last 20 or 30 years or so? It comes to mind, I was actually speaking with a Bloomberg intern. We have a great class of interns here. He's not on the media side. And I asked what he was studying. He said, well, I'm now studying cyber security, but I spent my first year majoring in computer science and programming. And he saw the writing on the wall.