Welcome to Eye on AI, with AI reporter Sharon Goldman. In this edition…Why some workers feel a sense of loss while AI boosts productivity…Anthropic raising fresh $10 Billion at $350 billion valuation…Musk’s xAI closed $20 billion funding with Nvidia backing…Can AI do your job? See the results from hundreds of tests.

For months, software developers have been giddy with excitement over “vibe coding”– prompting desired software functions or features in natural language—with the latest AI code generation tools. Anthropic’s Claude Code is the darling of the moment, but OpenAI’s Codex, Cursor and other tools have also led engineers to flood social media with examples of tasks that used to take days and are now finished in minutes. 

Even veteran software design leaders have marvelled at the shift. “In just a few months, Claude Code has pushed the state of the art in software engineering further than 75 years of academic research,” said Erik Meijer, a former senior engineering leader at Meta. 

Skills honed seem less essential

However, that same delight has turned disorienting for many developers, who are grappling with a sense of loss as skills honed over a lifetime suddenly seem less essential. The feeling of flow—of being “in the zone”—seems to have vanished as building software becomes an exercise in supervising AI tools rather than writing code. 

In a blog post this week titled “The Grief When AI Writes All the Code,” Gergely Orosz of The Pragmatic Engineer, wrote that he is “coming to terms with the high probability that AI will write most of my code which I ship to production.” It already does it faster, he explained, and for languages and frameworks he is less familiar with, it does a better job. 

“It feels like something valuable is being taken away, and suddenly,” he wrote. “It took a lot of effort to get good at coding and to learn how to write code that works, to read and understand complex code, and to debug and fix when code doesn’t work as it should.” 

Andrew Duca, founder of tax software Awaken Tax, wrote a similar post this week that went viral, saying that he was feeling “kinda depressed” even though he finds using Claude Code “incredible” and has “never found coding more fun.” 

He can now solve customer problems faster, and ship more features, but at the same time “the skill I spent 10,000s of hours getting good at…is becoming a full commodity extremely quickly,” he wrote. “There’s something disheartening about the thing you spent most of your life getting good at now being mostly useless.” 

Software development has long been on the front lines of the AI shift, partly because there are decades of code, documentation and public problem-solving (from sites like GitHub) available online for AI models to train on. Coding also has clear rules and fast feedback – it runs or it doesn’t – so AI systems can easily learn how to generate useful responses. That means programming has become one of the first white-collar professions to feel AI’s impact so directly.