Is traditional coding dead? That’s the question many developers have been asking themselves this week following the launch of powerful new coding models from OpenAI and Anthropic.
Last week, OpenAI and Anthropic dropped their respective coding models—GPT-5.3-Codex and Claude Opus 4.6—both of which represented significant leaps in AI coding capabilities. GPT-5.3-Codex showed markedly higher performance on coding benchmarks than earlier models, while Opus 4.6 introduced a feature that lets users deploy autonomous AI agent teams that can tackle different aspects of complex projects simultaneously. Both models can write, test, and debug code with minimal human intervention—even iterating on their own work and refining features before presenting results to developers.
The releases—especially GPT-5.3-Codex—sparked something of an online existential crisis among software engineers. At the heart of it was a viral essay written by Matt Shumer, CEO of OthersideAI. Shumer said that “something clicked” following the model releases and described AI models now handling the entire development cycle autonomously—writing tens of thousands of lines of code, opening applications, testing features, and iterating until satisfied, with developers simply describing desired outcomes and walking away. He proposed that the advances meant that AI could disrupt jobs more severely than the COVID-19 pandemic.
The essay drew mixed reactions. Some tech leaders agreed, including Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, but others, including NYU professor Gary Marcus, criticized it as “weaponized hype.” (Marcus noted that Shumer provided no data supporting claims that AI can write complex apps without errors.) Fortune’s Jeremy Kahn also argued that it was coding’s unique characteristics—like automated testing—that made it easier to fully automate, while the automation of other knowledge-work fields may be more elusive.
Software engineers as early adopters
For many engineers, some of Shumer’s warnings just reflect their current reality. Many engineers say they have stopped coding entirely, instead relying on AI to write code at their direction.
While the new releases do represent meaningful improvements, developers also said the industry has been undergoing a slow transformation over the past year as models became capable enough to handle increasingly complex tasks autonomously. While developers at leading tech companies have largely stopped writing code line-by-line, they haven’t stopped building software—they’ve become directors of AI systems that do the typing for them. The skill has transformed from writing code to architecting solutions and
