11 Times Coding Died in 2025

In 2025, declaring the death of software engineering became a recurring sport in Silicon Valley. Founders, CEOs, and AI researchers lined up to announce that code was about to write itself, and engineers were about to become optional. None of it quite played out that way. But, the declarations themselves defined the year.

Mark Zuckerberg and the Mid-Level Engineer Apocalypse

In January 2025, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told the Joe Rogan Experience that AI would soon replace mid-level engineers across the industry. He framed it as an economic inevitability rather than a moral choice. “A lot of the code we have in our apps will be built by AI engineers instead of people engineers.” 

The comment landed hard because it came from a company that employs thousands of developers. For many engineers, this was the moment casual anxiety turned into something sharper.

Dario Amodei’s Three to Six Month Countdown

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei delivered one of the boldest timelines of the year while speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations. “I think we will be there in three to six months, where AI is writing 90% of the code. And then, in 12 months, we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code.” 

The quote ricocheted through tech Twitter and VC decks alike. It became shorthand for how fast things were supposedly moving.

Marc Benioff Puts Engineering Hiring on Ice

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff moved from prediction to policy. In January, he publicly said the company was debating whether to hire any engineers at all in 2025. 

Benioff said they are seriously debating if they need to hire anybody this year. He cited 30% productivity gains from AI agents. This isn’t a future scenario, but a real hiring conversation at a $200 billion company.

Sam Altman and the Race to the World’s Best Coder

In February, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the quiet part out loud. He predicted that by the end of 2025, an AI system would be the best programmer in the world. He pointed to internal benchmarks showing OpenAI’s reasoning model climbing competitive programming leaderboards and said they would “hit number one by the end of this year.” 

Software engineering, in this framing, was just another leaderboard waiting to be topped.

Sundar Pichai’s Ever-Rising Code Percentages

Google CEO Sundar Pichai did not declare engineers obsolete outright. He let the numbers do the talking. In October 2024, he said over 25% of Google’s new code was AI generated. By June 2025, that figure had crossed 30%. Each earnings call pushed the number higher and fed speculation about where it would stop. The implication was clear even if the word “replacement” was never used.

Jensen Huang Declares a New Programming Language

At London Tech Week in June, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang delivered one of the most quoted lines of the year. “There’s a new programming language. It is called ‘human’.” Traditional programming, he argued, was effectively dead. The future was about describing intent and letting machines do the rest. 

It sounded liberating. It also sounded like a eulogy for hard technical skill.

Satya Nadella Quantifies the Shift Inside Microsoft

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella revealed between April and June that 20% to 30% of Microsoft’s internal codebases were already written entirely by AI. He shared this casually, almost as a progress update. Coming from a company with tens of thousands of engineers, the message landed quietly but heavily. This was not a lab demo. This was production code.

Tobias Lütke Flips the Burden of Proof at Shopify

In April, a leaked internal memo from Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke made headlines across tech. AI use was now a “fundamental expectation.” Teams had to prove that AI could not do a task before asking for more people. The default assumption was no longer that work needed engineers. Engineers had to justify themselves.

Duolingo Goes “AI First”

Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn announced an “AI First” strategy that same month. The company would “gradually stop using contractors to do work that AI can handle.” Managers were required to show that AI could not do a job before hiring humans. By August, 80% of Duolingo engineers were using AI tools daily. The message was not subtle. Adapt or get out of the way.

Bill Gates Says Humans Will Be “Unnecessary for Most Things”

Across interviews in 2025, Bill Gates delivered the widest version of the claim. He said AI would make humans “unnecessary for most things” within a decade. Software development was a central example. He added that if he were starting a company today, it would be “AI-first.” When one of the original architects of the software industry talks this way, people listen.

Arvind Krishna and IBM’s 30% White-Collar Shock

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna framed the threat more broadly, but software engineers were firmly in the blast radius. In multiple interviews through 2025, he said AI could replace up to 30% of white-collar jobs. He paired the warning with reassurance, arguing that total employment would still grow. 

The contradiction did not go unnoticed. On one hand, mass displacement, and on the other, optimism. For engineers, the takeaway was simpler than the nuance. A third of roles were on the line, and no one was pretending software was exempt.

The Irony

By the end of 2025, none of these predictions had fully materialised. AI did not write 90% of the world’s code. Software engineers were not wiped out. Hiring freezes quietly softened. Teams still needed people who understood systems, trade-offs, and failure modes. What did survive were the quotes. 

Together, they form a perfect time capsule of a year when confidence ran far ahead of reality.

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