In a blog post titled ‘How AI is transforming work at Anthropic’, the company shared the findings of its research study, which surveyed 132 of its engineers and researchers, had 53 detailed interviews, and examined the internal use of Claude Code, Anthropic’s agentic coding tool.
“We find that AI use is radically changing the nature of work for software developers, generating both hope and concern,” the blog reads. AI is changing work, and Anthropic studied its own employees to learn exactly how. One of the biggest AI giants, Anthropic studied its engineers to assess how AI tools like Claude Code are impacting work. The study aimed to understand how AI is transforming work at the company and society more broadly.
Another engineer made a similar comparison, but noted that abstraction comes at a cost—with the move to higher-level languages, most engineers lost a deep understanding of memory handling.
Perhaps, in particular with the rise of “vibe coding”, we’re now moving to English as a programming language. A few employees said they felt that this shift empowers them to think at a higher level—“about the end product and the end user” rather than just the code. Perhaps software engineering is moving to higher levels of abstraction, which it has done in the past. Early programmers worked much closer to the machine—manually managing memory, writing in assembly language, or even toggling physical switches to input instructions. Over time, higher-level, more human-readable languages emerged that automatically handled complex, low-level operations. One of our staff suggested that aspiring engineers “get good at having AIs [write code], and focus on learning higher level concepts and patterns. “I’m very glad I knew how to do that… [but] doing those low level operations isn’t particularly important emotionally. I would rather care about what the code allows me to do.
One person described the current shift by comparing it to previously having to learn linked-lists in computer science—fundamental structures that higher-level programming languages now handle automatically.