alt Hacker NewsIt really is the most misanthropic company, isn't it? But strategically is all this fearmongering about SWEs becoming obsolete even the right move for Anthropic?
Say that it is borderline true (it's not, but let's pretend). Then companies can lay off 90 devs for every 100, and buy the remaining 10 devs Claude subscriptions. Isn't it better if they keep all 100 and buy everyone a Claude sub?
So shouldn't Anthropic actually be pushing the narrative that Claude doesn't replace devs but actually makes them vastly better at their jobs and so every company, big and small, should buy every dev the highest tier Claude enterprise subscription?
A lot of it is directed at senior management who are wetting themselves at the prospect of being able to fire those irritating, demanding, highly paid developers.
They don't want higher productivity because what are they going to do with that? Launching new products is costly and uncertain. They don't want to be paying the same number of developers and have them all spending money on Claude subs. But the idea of firing 90% of them and having the rest in fear for their jobs? Brilliant!
Back in the real world, the question is what's going to happen to companies that go through with this. When they have vast amounts of slop code that no one understands? When you have to sit in with a customer and explain why the product doesn't work and no one knows even how it works never mind how to fix it? We can already see the inklings of this in the huge buggy messes that Microsoft and Anthropic are producing. Interesting times.