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by lelanthran 48 days ago
> I don't know what the coding world is going to look like in 5-10 years, but everything has changed radically in the space of a year from maybe 10% of people using agents to code to probably 95% of people now. In about a YEAR.

Last I saw about a week ago, the stats were about 35%. There may be some confusion around this:

1. The absolute number could have remained the same but the sheer volume of vibe-coders who never coded before raised the percentage. For example, if 100 out of a population of 1000 people uses AI then the percentage is 10%. If, over the next year 9k new vibers were created but none of the existing 1000 people changed their workflow, you will see 9100 people out of 10000 people using AI - that's now a 91% rate of people using AI to code even though none of the people since last year changed the way they work.

2. Last I checked, pre-AI, there were about 12m working developers in the world (SO survey extrapolated). As of February this year, CC, by itself, had 60k subscribers. Even if we err on the side of optimism and assume every single subscriber is running the agent, that's still not 95% of developers.

> I still think us "engineers" will have a role to play, but I genuinely don't know what it will look like.

??? We already know what it looks like - "Business Analyst" has bee a role since forever (at least since 1995, when I entered the workforce). If you wanted a role where you wrote no code but merely drew up specs for the programmers to code, you could have had it as a BA.

It's just that few of us wanted to do that as it paid half what an engineer made. Now with the supply of BAs potentially doubling, it will pay a quarter of what an engineer used to make.

1 comments

I don't know what industry you work in or what developers surround you, but the number of developers NOT using agentic coders in my workplace is 0.

And I know this is the same in peers workplaces.

> I don't know what industry you work in or what developers surround you,

Why would that matter? I'm not giving you my experience of developers next to me, I'm telling you what I gleaned from published reports.

I don't believe those figures. Perhaps we could discuss more if you linked the reports.

In any case, I know how these arguments go. It doesn't really matter.

> I don't believe those figures. Perhaps we could discuss more if you linked the reports.

No report is going to help because there are no actual figures for token providers at the moment. We'll have to wait for them to IPO before we'll know for sure.

And yet you are citing some concrete report you aren't sharing. The problem with your original comment is you scoped it to subscribers (which I assume is how this unshared report was framed). API billing for enterprises will far surpass that number in individual users. Claude Code is available at my org to every person employed here and that's just shy of 2k people, and I can say with confidence we are not 3% of Anthropics customer base alone.
In my workplace number of “agentic coders” users is 1. And among principle and seniors - 0.