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Anthropic's Claude artificial intelligence tool can outperform large professional teams on certain coding- and execution-heavy tasks, a partner at Y Combinator has claimed.
This has sparked a debate about the role of AI in consulting and other service sectors. The debate started after Y Combinator executive Tom Blomfield took to the microblogging site X (formerly Twitter) to write: “The entire Accenture workforce is about to be outperformed by a 24-year-old who learned Claude Code last Tuesday.” However, when X users questioned why he focused on one company [in this case Accenture], he replied, “Because that would be a less punchy tweet.”The comment reflects ongoing changes in how AI tools are being deployed.
At Anthropic, which develops Claude, executives said in February 2026 that AI now handles most coding work within the organisation, influencing how engineers spend their time and how hiring decisions are made.
What Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark said about Claude’s current role in the company
Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark recently said that Claude is currently writing “comfortably the majority” of the company’s code. If current trends continue, he said AI could produce nearly all of it by the end of the year.
Speaking on The Ezra Klein Show, Clark said this shift has changed the balance between junior and senior roles within the company.He noted that AI systems now handle many tasks that once served as entry points for younger engineers. Routine implementation work, repetitive coding and standard fixes no longer require the same level of human involvement. What remains are decisions that demand experience – understanding system behaviour, anticipating problems and deciding which ideas are worth pursuing.
As a result, Anthropic is placing greater weight on engineers with long experience and strong judgement.Clark stressed that this does not mean the company is shrinking its engineering workforce. More people with software engineering skills work at Anthropic today than two years ago, and the company continues to hire actively. What has changed is the nature of the work engineers are expected to do. As Claude takes over basic execution, human effort is pushed toward the hardest and most nuanced parts of the job. Clark described this process as "O-ring automation," where automation removes one bottleneck and draws human attention to the next.These changes moved beyond internal operations with the launch of Claude Cowork earlier this year. Designed as an enterprise-focused, agentic AI workspace, Claude Cowork allows AI agents to plan and execute multi-step tasks directly on a user’s computer. The effect intensified recently when Anthropic introduced 11 automation plug-ins that enable Claude to independently complete workflows previously handled by large teams or enterprise software platforms.The market reaction in India and other markets was immediate. Last month, the Nifty IT index recorded its sharpest decline since the Covid-era downturn. Shares of Infosys, TCS, Wipro, HCLTech, LTIMindtree and Coforge dropped, erasing nearly Rs 2 lakh crore in market value in a single trading session.Much of the concern focused on Claude Cowork’s legal automation features. These systems can review contracts, non-disclosure agreements and compliance documents in volumes that previously required large legal and operations teams. Tasks that earlier took days or weeks can now be completed in minutes, raising questions for industries that rely on scale and workforce size.
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