Is the "Software Engineer" Title Dying? A Full Breakdown of Claude Code Creator Boris's YC Interview

Author: Muzi
Source: InfoQ
Date: 2026-02-20

Claude Code founder Boris Cherny's key insights from a YC roundtable discussion:

Key Judgments

Coding is being "solved" — Many people at Anthropic already write 70–100% of their code with Claude. Boris himself has been 100% Claude Code since Opus 4.5, uninstalled his IDE, and ships 20 PRs a day.
Plan mode may disappear within a month — It's essentially just adding "don't write code yet" to the prompt. As models get stronger, they'll enter this mode automatically.
Don't build products for today's model — build for the model six months from now — Adding scaffolding might get you 10% more performance, but the next-generation model will give that to you for free. All non-model capabilities will eventually become technical debt.
Code has a shelf life of only a few months — Almost all of Claude Code's code from six months ago is gone. Refactoring is the norm.
Multi-agent collaboration is the key variable — Parallel sub-agents are essentially test-time compute + context isolation, significantly improving performance on complex tasks. The Plugins feature was almost entirely built by a swarm over a single weekend.
The "software engineer" title will disappear — It will become builder, product manager, or the title will remain but only as a legacy symbol.
Anthropic's per-engineer output increased 150% — Data since Claude Code launched.

Latent demand — Don't educate users to change their behavior. Amplify what they're already doing.
Keep CLAUDE.md short — Boris's own is only two lines. Deleting and starting over beats over-engineering.
Iteration speed is the moat — Build 20 prototypes in a day. Fast iteration beats designing the perfect solution.
Delight matters — Products shouldn't just be useful. They should be loved.

The most important skill is beginner's mind — Being able to admit mistakes, let go of old experience, and think from first principles.
Don't bet against the model — The Bitter Lesson: more general methods ultimately beat more specialized ones.
Figure out what the model wants to do, then make it easier for the model to do that.
In hiring, ask: "Give me an example of a time you were wrong."

Claude Teams: multiple agents each with clean, uncorrelated context windows.
Sub-agents are essentially recursive Claude Code, prompted out by a "mama Claude."
Boris calibrates the number of sub-agents to task difficulty: a bit harder = 3, or 5, or even 10 running parallel research.
Claudes communicate with each other and will directly message engineers on Slack to ask questions.

Design, finance, and data science teams are all using Claude Code.
Co-work is essentially a GUI wrapper for Claude Code, built in 10 days, almost 100% written by Claude Code itself.