John Gruber makes a ridiculous assertion, or so it seems to me. In criticising Dario Amodei, the CEO of the AI startup Anthropic’s claim that ‘AI, and not software developers, could be writing all of the code in [their] software in a year’, Gruber takes things the other way:

It may well be true that 90 percent of the lines of programming code that are written today, Friday 13 March 2026, will have been generated by AI. If anything, it’s probably a higher percentage.

This seems like nonsense to me. Certainly AI-generated code is being created, and some of it released. But I work in software development, in a real company making real software that moves people’s money around. There’s some experimentation going on, people will use it to try things out, or better understand things, as I mentioned a few weeks ago. But there are millions of lines of code out there being written and managed every day by real humans.

And when you’re working in a highly-regulated industry like the payment card one as I am, or medical systems, say, it seems unlikely to me that we will ever let significant applications into the world if they were not written by humans.

Maybe I’m being naive, at least by saying ’ever’: if there’s one certainty it’s that things will change. But the idea that we’re already above the 90% AI-generated mark? Sure, Anthropic are likely to be at that level. They build these tools. Eating your own dogfood and all that. But for normal, day-to-day development? It just doesn’t ring true to me.

Plus, of course, software development is about a lot more than writing code. But that’s a discussion for another time.