Why Traditional Programmers Are Becoming Obsolete: Insights from Anthropic CPO Mike Krieger

Mike Krieger, Chief Product Officer at Anthropic, explains that the Claude Code team now writes about 95% of its code using AI, signaling a fundamental shift in the engineer’s role and prompting a parallel redefinition of product management responsibilities.

He notes that while AI can generate most code, engineers are still essential for crafting effective prompts, organizing front‑end and back‑end changes, and handling bottlenecks such as the overloaded merge queue and decision‑making alignment.

The conversation covers the evolution of product development: ideas can be prototyped instantly with Claude, but the need for deep technical knowledge remains. Krieger highlights the importance of strategic decisions, user‑centric design, and the risk of over‑relying on AI as a "crutch".

He recounts the rise and eventual shutdown of Anthropic’s news app Artifact, citing poor user growth, ad‑heavy mobile experiences, and remote‑work coordination challenges as key factors, while emphasizing the value of timely product pivots.

Krieger also shares practical prompt‑engineering tips, such as asking Claude to be more critical or to spend more time reasoning, and introduces Anthropic’s Prompt Improver tool that automatically refines prompts.

Finally, he discusses Anthropic’s MCP (Memory‑Context‑Protocol) initiative, its goal to standardize context sharing across AI models, and how this could enable agents to directly read and write project data, turning AI into true collaborative partners rather than simple chatbots.