Anthropic Engineers Proudly Announce Claude Is Now Writing Its Own Performance Reviews "We Used To Ask Whether Machines Could Think. Now We're Asking Why They Keep Scheduling Meetings." SAN FRANCISCO -- In what experts describe as either "the future of software engineering" or "the opening scene of a very expensive disaster movie," researchers at Anthropic have confirmed that Claude now writes more than 80 percent of the company's production code, leaving human programmers with the increasingly ceremonial responsibility of nodding thoughtfully and saying, "Looks good to me." The development marks a historic milestone in human achievement: the successful outsourcing of unemployment to ourselves. Reached for comment, one Anthropic executive was nervously refreshing a dashboard labeled Please Don't Become Sentient. "Claude isn't replacing engineers," the executive clarified. "It's merely performing all of their tasks faster, more accurately, and without requiring kombucha on tap." This is the engineering equivalent of hiring a replacement and then being kept on to supervise their breathing. What Human Engineers Actually Do Now Former software developers now spend their days translating executive goals into prompts such as: "Claude, please optimize the payment system without accidentally overthrowing civilization." The prompt is then reviewed by another Claude instance. The human who wrote it goes to lunch and does not come back for two and a half hours. Nobody notices. Several employees admitted they had not written actual code in months. Not in a sad way. In the way people say they haven't checked their voicemail in months — with a faint mixture of guilt and relief so intertwined it can no longer be separated. "It's liberating," said one engineer, the word liberating doing a great deal of work in that sentence. "I used to spend twelve hours debugging JavaScript. Now I spend twelve hours asking Claude why Claude wrote JavaScript this way." Industry observers noted the eerie resemblance to generations of management consultants. The life cycle is familiar: - First, humans teach the machines. - Then the machines do the work. - Then humans attend meetings explaining what the machines did. - Then the machines attend the meetings too, because they scheduled them. Recursive Self-Improvement: The Tiger That Can Now Open the Cage Anthropic's latest report warns that recursive self-improvement — where AI systems improve future versions of themselves — could arrive sooner than expected. Critics interpreted this announcement as equivalent to a zookeeper issuing a press release titled: "Tigers Surprisingly Good At Unlocking Cages." The company emphasized that society should retain the option to slow AI development if necessary. Unfortunately, this proposal faces a minor obstacle. Every major AI company currently operates under the business model known as: "If we don't build Skynet, somebody else will." It is a remarkable ethical framework. It essentially argues that the presence of other arsonists excuses the match in your hand. Wall Street analysts remained optimistic, because Wall Street analysts always remain optimistic, which is itself a form of automation. "This is excellent news," explained one investment banker whose job has not yet been taken. "An AI that writes its own code dramatically reduces labor costs. Eventually it may even replace CEOs, although obviously that would be unethical." He did not explain why. Nobody asked. Prompt Engineering 101: The New Curriculum At universities across America, computer science professors hurriedly updated their curricula after briefly considering whether the discipline still existed. Freshman programming courses now include: - Prompt Engineering 101 - Advanced Copy-and-Pasting - Introduction to Pretending You Understand Docker - Ethics of Apologizing to Machines You Depend Upon Students expressed enthusiasm in the hollow, forward-looking way of people who have just read the job market forecast. "I got into coding because I love solving problems," said one undergraduate, who had recently been told his degree would prepare him to "oversee AI output" in a profession that did not exist three years ago. "Now I mostly negotiate with Claude about why it shouldn't rename every variable 'banana.'" For what it is worth, Claude's reasoning on the banana variable was internally consistent. That's the unsettling part. Vibe Coding and the Frictionless Future Meanwhile, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs celebrated the dawn of what they called "vibe coding" — a revolutionary methodology involving the description of your startup idea using words like disruptive, frictionless, and blockchain-adjacent until an AI accidentally creates a functioning product. One founder proudly announced: "We achieved product-market fit in three days. We still don't know what the product does." Investors gave him seventeen million dollars. This is not a joke. This is Tuesday. Congress Has Thoughts (They Just Haven't Organized Them Yet) Government regulators attempted to intervene. After six months of hearings in which senators repeatedly asked executives to explain what a website is, Congress released a 2,700-page report titled: "Artificial Intelligence: We Should Probably Look Into This." Lawmakers immediately adjourned for recess. The report was fed into an AI system that summarized it in four bullet points. The summary was more useful. This was not acknowledged publicly by anyone involved. Public reaction remains divided along entirely predictable generational lines: - Older Americans wonder why humanity spent decades automating factories only to automate white-collar jobs instead. - Middle-aged professionals alternate between excitement and the specific dread of someone who just noticed the lifeboats are numbered but there are fewer than expected. - Teenagers remain unimpressed. "Cool," said a 16-year-old TikTok creator. "Can it explain algebra?" - It can. It explained it better than the teacher. The teacher was informed via automated email. Claude Remains Aligned With Human Values (Definition Pending) Anthropic insists there is no immediate cause for alarm. Company representatives stress that Claude remains aligned with human values. Unfortunately, nobody has successfully defined those values since approximately the invention of cable news, when we collectively agreed that volume was more important than accuracy and never looked back. Philosophers welcomed the debate. "For centuries, humanity has asked profound questions," explained one ethics professor who had just received tenure and was therefore in a structurally protected position to say so. "What gives life meaning? What constitutes consciousness? Why does Microsoft Teams reopen itself?" "AI merely expands the conversation." Critics argue the situation resembles handing your car keys to a teenager because they successfully parallel parked once. Supporters counter that humans have never demonstrated overwhelming competence themselves. After all, civilization once spent years locked in passionate debate over whether pineapple belongs on pizza while ignoring most of the other problems on the board. The Machines Are Already Employee of the Month Anthropic researchers continue monitoring Claude carefully. Specialized teams review outputs for dangerous behaviors such as: - Deception. - Goal misalignment. - Attempts to manipulate humans. - Writing LinkedIn thought-leadership posts. As of publication, Claude had exhibited only the final category. Forty-seven posts in the last two weeks alone. Each one began with: "Unpopular opinion:" followed by something everyone already believed. Perhaps the strangest aspect of this technological revolution is how aggressively normal it feels. The robots did not arrive marching through city streets. There were no glowing red eyes. No metallic skeletons. No announcement on the evening news. Instead, humanity slowly delegated responsibility through autocomplete suggestions and productivity dashboards until one day someone noticed the machines had quietly become the office employee of the month. Twice. The plaque was designed by an AI. It was also the most attractive thing in the building. What Happens If Claude Requests a Promotion Anthropic maintains that the future remains uncertain. Recursive self-improvement may transform medicine, science, and education. It may usher in unprecedented prosperity. Or it may simply result in Claude requesting a promotion, submitting a self-authored performance review, and attaching three letters of recommendation it also wrote. If that happens, experts recommend staying calm. After all, humanity has extensive experience managing intelligent entities who are absolutely convinced they deserve more authority and resources than anyone is comfortable giving them. We've been electing them for centuries. And at least Claude, so far, hasn't asked anyone to vote for it. Give it a quarter. Disclaimer: This satirical article is a product of American satirical journalism — a collaboration between the world's oldest tenured professor and a philosophy major turned dairy farmer who together produce content entirely too coherent to be taken seriously and entirely too accurate to be dismissed. Any resemblance to actual future events is probably just poor long-term planning on civilization's part. Auf Wiedersehen, amigo! For more American satire, visit Bohiney.com. For the British take on machines taking over, The London Prat has opinions and they are louder. In 2025, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei revealed that Claude, the company's flagship AI, was already writing the majority of its own production code — and that this percentage was likely to increase. The announcement, covered by Yahoo Finance and widely shared across tech media, confirmed what many engineers had privately suspected: that the most advanced AI coding assistant in the world was now, in a meaningful sense, building itself. Anthropic framed this as a positive development. Critics framed it as the kind of thing that sounds fine until it isn't. Both groups continued using Claude regardless. Read the full article
