All software engineers are now QAs

At the start of June 2026, Anthropic published a statistic that was controversial. Most of what Anthropic says publicly generates a large number of cynical comments, so make of that what you will. The quote and statistic were that 80% of Anthropic's code is generated by Claude. Even up to 90% for new features. What was interesting about this was that a) it's actually totally insane and b) it made me think of something interesting that might happen. Since the start of the present wave of AI Psychosis at the end of 2022, it's something that I used to say as a joke: all software engineers will eventually become a QA to AI generated code. Trust but verify Let's explore (a) first: why it's totally insane. It's a bold claim but I'd like to poke a few holes in it. Claude Code is an amazing tool. I'm a daily user, favouring the "trust but verify" method of coding using Claude Code. All of my questions about software and infrastructure get answered satisfactorily, and when I feel like I don't believe it, I will verify the answer myself. If it writes code, I check. So, really, the state of the code that AI tools write doesn't really matter. As long as the end product is good quality to most of the users. And that's the first hole: it shouldn't be good quality for most users, it should be good quality for all users. If you're using an AI coding tool to generate code, then I would expect you to spend a bit of time on working out how to properly ensure quality instead of spending extra time writing code with bugs. Every software engineering team has got priorities to ship working code. But if you're using AI coding tools to 10x your output, then maybe ease off a bit and 7x your output and 3x the quality. When humans write code.... Earlier in 2026 we saw a leak of Claude Code's code. The code is far from clean. The general thoughts online are that it is just "messy production code". Legacy code gets messy after a while caused by a lack of a good QA process and lax standards. It s