Cursor, an emerging AI tool used for generating and editing lines of code, saw one of the most unusual bug reports ever posted by a user on its official forum. The developer was using Cursor to generate code for a racing game when the AI programming assistant abruptly refused to continue doing its work and, instead, told the developer to “develop the logic yourself”. “Generating code for others can lead to dependency and reduced learning opportunities,” Cursor’s response read, as per the bug report.
While AI assistants are known to have refused to complete their work in the past, Cursor’s response oddly ties into a growing debate that has gripped the software engineering community recently. With the rise of AI coding tools such as GitHub Copilot, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, Windsurf, Replit, Cursor and Devin AI, the tech industry appears to be divided over critical questions such as: Will AI revolutionise coding? If so, how much coding will it actually automate? What does vibe coding mean? And should people still invest time in learning to code?
To understand what AI really means for coding skills, let’s take a look at the different dimensions of the unfolding debate.
‘AI will take over coding entirely’
While concerns about the impact of AI on software development have been brewing for some time now, the issue came to a head when Dario Amodei, the CEO of the AI startup Anthropic, made a proclamation that rattled more than a few.
Speaking at a Council of Foreign Relations event last week, Amodei said that AI will be able to generate all the code required for developing software in a year’s time. “I think we will be there in three to six months, where AI is writing 90 per cent of the code. And then, in 12 months, we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code,” he said.
Amodei further opined that software developers will have a role to play in the short term. “But on the other hand, I think that eventually all those little islands will get picked off by AI systems. And then, we will eventually reach the point where the AIs can do everything that humans can. And I think that will happen in every industry,” he added.
The bold prediction made by Anthropic’s CEO was also echoed by Garry Tan, the president and CEO of startup incubator Y Combinator. “For 25 per cent of the Winter 2025 batch, 95 per cent of lines of code are LLM-generated. That’s not a typo,” Tan wrote in a post on X.