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🟪 Friday charts

When the code writes itself

Byron Gilliam
February 06, 2026

Friday charts: When the code writes itself

Anthropic will introduce their Claude chatbot to football fans this weekend, with a series of Super Bowl commercials taken straight from The Truman Show.

The spots feature a chatbot in human form that sneaks product pitches into its responses, like Truman Burbank’s wife awkwardly promoting a new cocoa drink in the middle of a difficult conversation.

“Ads are coming to AI,” Anthropic’s ads warn. “But not to Claude.”

That’s good, I guess.

But if football fans start using free-tier chatbots for everything, where’s the money going to come from to pay for said chatbots?

The market thinks it knows: companies’ software budgets.

2025 started with a market panic over Deepseek, which we briefly thought would commoditize LLMs and undermine the demand for GPUs.

2026 has started with a panic over Claude Code, which we think will commoditize programming and undermine the demand for software.

It feels bigger than the stock market this time.

“Today will go down as some kind of turning point,” Tyler Cowen predicted in reference to the release of Claude Cowork. He didn’t mean just for investors.

“This represents something momentous,” Noah Smith wrote this week. “The end of an economic age.”

Why right now? Possibly because the code has started writing itself: The code for Claude Code was written by Claude Code.

The creator of Node.js, Ryan Dahl, believes this means “the era of humans writing code is over.”

Aditya Agarwal, among the first engineers to write code for Facebook, reluctantly concedes that it’s “very clear that we will never ever write code by hand again.”

And the influential AI researcher Andrei Karpathy says he’s losing the ability to program: “I’ve already noticed that I am slowly starting to atrophy my ability to write code manually.”

All this is causing a mental health crisis among professional coders, an engineer at LinkedIn reports.

It’s caused a crisis among investors as well, who were indiscriminately selling SaaS stocks this week on the idea that people will use AI to create their own software instead of buying it from, say, Microsoft or Salesforce.

You can see why: If the hot new programming language is just language, then everyone can create their own software. And if anyone can create software, why would they continue paying for it?

But Jensen Huang strongly disagrees — he thinks the idea that software companies will lose business to AI is “the most illogical thing in the world.”

Stratechery’s Ben Thompson does, too: “It’s facile to say companies are going to spin up their own CRMs.”

Developing software, he explains, is much more than writing code — it’s finding a problem to solve, working out the right way to solve it, maintaining the code, ensuring it’s safe, etc.

These things will continue to be hard to do, so enterprise software will continue to be written by software companies.

But Thompson nonetheless thinks investors are right to worry: “The level of competition between SaaS products is going to explode and become ruinous.”

In short, he thinks the cost of developing software will drop so dramatically that SaaS companies will start invading each other’s turf — think Microsoft getting into e-commerce and Spotify getting into spreadsheets.

Thompson predicts this SaaS free-for-all will result in a vicious circle of price-cutting that will undermine the profitability of software makers and scare off their investors.

“Everyone has to brace themselves, because how the software industry pulls out of this spiral is through massive amounts of layoffs," Thompson warns. “It’s going to be bad.”

In tech circles, the sentiment is already very bad.

And Anthropic’s Super Bowl ads will get even more people talking about it this weekend.

But do you remember the OpenAI Super Bowl ad that got everyone worried about AI last year?

Me neither.

Let’s hope that this, too, shall pass — and check the charts.

Is code just content now?

“Software is following the path of all content,” Dror Poleg says. “[A]nyone can create it, few can make money from it.”

When code writes the code:

“4% of GitHub public commits are being authored by Claude Code right now,” SemiAnalysis says. “At the current trajectory, we believe that Claude Code will be 20%+ of all daily commits by the end of 2026.”

Sign of the times:

Queries on Stack Overflow, the website where programmers can ask for coding advice, have dropped to near zero, because now they just ask an AI (which probably learned the answer from Stack Overflow).

The start of something?

In surveys of US employers, roughly 55,000 job cuts in 2025 were attributed to AI. That made AI only the sixth most frequently-cited culprit, but it was growing fast.

Don’t blame AI (yet):

A new study from the Fed attributes falling US employment to the falling supply of employees.

Hiring freeze:

Samuel Tombs notes that two-thirds of the drop in JOLTS job openings reported this week come from the professional and business-services sector — the first sector you’d expect to feel the effects of AI.

Fewer participation trophies:

Only 89.5% of US men in their “prime” years of 25-54 are gainfully employed, down from 97.5% in the 1950s. The drop has been attributed to many factors: fewer middle-skill jobs, the opioid epidemic, rising incarceration rates, disability benefits, and more people simply choosing not to work, among others.

Consumers are historically unhappy:

Sentiment among US consumers is near the lowest on record, probably for all of the reasons mentioned above.

US workers are more productive:

Torston Slok believes “we are likely in the early stages of another productivity boom.” If so, it might mean companies will be doing more with fewer (human) workers. But historically, it’s meant they’ve found more work for people to do.

Software stocks vs. BTC: