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.
