How AI Coding Agents Will Change Your Job

YC’s Tom Blomfield argues AI coding agents will eliminate most software engineering jobs within 5–10 years, citing his own 35,000-line app built without writing a single line of code.

• Blomfield built a 35,000-line production app with thousands of users writing zero lines of code himself, using Claude Code and Cursor.
• ~50% of current YC batch companies write most of their code with AI agents; two batches ago it was ~0%.
• Blomfield predicts software engineering jobs as they exist today will not exist in 5–10 years.
• He accepts Jevons Paradox (demand for software will rise sharply) but argues AI, not humans, will meet that demand.
• Lora, a YC legal-AI company, cracked the ‘lawyers never buy software’ assumption; legal/finance/medicine now see AI as competitive table stakes.
• The transition period—potentially hundreds of millions displaced—is the biggest risk, not the long-run abundance outcome.
• Key founder skill for the next era: identifying human problems, not writing code, since building is becoming trivially cheap.
• Small teams of 2–4 engineers can now build what required 40 engineers two years ago, which Lieb expects will sharply raise product design quality.

2025-05-09 · Watch on YouTube