Believe the Checkbook
January 12, 2026
Anthropic’s AI agent was the most prolific code contributor to Bun’s GitHub repository, submitting more merged pull requests than any human developer. Then Anthropic paid millions to acquire the human team anyway. The code was MIT-licensed; they could have forked it for free. Instead, they bought the people.
Publicly, AI companies talk like engineering is being automated away. Privately, they deploy millions of dollars to acquire engineers who already work with AI at full tilt. That contradiction is not a PR mistake. It is a signal.
So what do you do with this as a technical leader?
Stop using AI as an excuse to devalue your best knowledge workers. Use it to give them more leverage.
No one knows exactly how LLMs will impact the practise of software engineering. Beyond that, no one remotely knows how they will impact.
I think the things we can take as a given are:
1. There will be, there already are, significant transformations.
2. Very little ultimately will look like what came before.
It’s hard to even imagine which of the significant transformations and the practise of software engineering over the last 75 years the current transformation most closely rhymes with. Terms of physical form factor, the change from punch cards to screen-based coding is one place to start. But then the transformation to IDEs was similarly profound. I think what we’re seeing may actually dwarf both of these, and what does that mean? I think the difference between what happens next and what came before will be more significant than are there of those other transformations that I mentioned.
