Engineers Are Finishing Decade-Old Projects on Their Subway Commutes

Paul Ford finished a project that had been sitting in his folder for 10 years. On his subway commute. His friends were having similar experiences. "I am less valuable than I used to be," he wrote in The New York Times.

At the center of this shift sits Anthropic's Claude Code. The company that spent years being the "responsible AI company" became 2026's most disruptive one.

The New Reality for Engineers

If ChatGPT had its moment with the general public, Claude Code delivered that shock to software engineers. They started shipping code at speeds that felt almost physically impossible.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei made a bold prediction at Davos: AI could handle most or all software engineering work within 6 to 12 months. Claude Code's creator went further, suggesting the job title itself might soon disappear.

Yet Anthropic's own hiring tells a different story. The company's software engineering job postings have climbed 170% since January 2025, with the curve accelerating.

When Markets Send Signals

When Anthropic published a blog post claiming Claude Code could translate legacy COBOL into modern languages, IBM lost roughly $40 billion in market cap in a single session. The broader sell-off wiped more than $1 trillion from Big Tech valuations.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called the panic "illogical." But Franklin Templeton's CEO told the Financial Times it looked like a genuine long-term threat to enterprise software's business model.

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For Anthropic, the disruption was pure gold. Revenue projections nearly doubled from $9 billion at the end of 2025 to $20 billion by early March. The share of U.S. companies paying for its tools jumped from roughly 4% a year ago to 20% in January.

The Pentagon Standoff

Then came the curveball. The Trump administration labeled Anthropic a supply-chain risk—a designation usually reserved for Chinese firms under espionage suspicion. The trigger? Anthropic refused to give blanket permission for its tools in autonomous weapons systems or mass surveillance.

Within hours, OpenAI announced a new Pentagon deal. CEO Sam Altman said publicly it included the same prohibitions on autonomous weapons and mass surveillance that Anthropic had sought. Not everyone believes that.

The fallout was swift in both directions. Anthropic's app shot to the top of the App Store. A boycott campaign targeted OpenAI. Turns out that sticking to your principles—or at least being seen to—is its own kind of marketing.

The Bigger Picture

The supply-chain risk designation poses real threats, potentially rippling through Anthropic's relationships with Amazon and Google—both significant federal contractors and two of the company's biggest backers. The company isn't yet profitable, making these relationships crucial.

Meanwhile, the enterprise software world is scrambling. Legal software stocks dropped. Design stocks dropped. The entire ecosystem built around human-intensive coding is suddenly questioning its foundation.

But here's what's undeniable: engineers are still on their subway commutes, finishing in an hour what used to take a week. The technology works. The question is whether the company behind it can navigate the political and commercial pressures that come with such power.

It's still only March.