October 5, 2026
The co-founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates, confirmed that technology amazed him deeply only three times in his entire life, noting that the third stop occurred this year after his in-depth preview of the artificial intelligence tool dedicated to programming, “Claude Code”, which is developed by the company “Anthropic”.
According to a report published by the Indian newspaper “The Times of India”, the first time Gates experienced this amount of astonishment dates back to 1980, when he saw for the first time the graphical user interface that later contributed to the formation of modern personal computers. The second time was in 2022, when the leaders of the “Open AI” company visited him to present a technology that later turned into the “GPT Chat” robot, before the “Claude Code” tool left a unique impression on him due to the extent of its capabilities.
In a recent interview, Gates commented, “The idea that these tools are now, in a tangible sense, better than me at this makes me wonder: What the heck is going on?” This recognition gains exceptional significance in view of his professional career, as he began programming as a teenager in Seattle, and founded Microsoft in 1975 with Paul Allen based on programs they wrote themselves, and writing programming codes has long been the skill that distinguishes him from others.
The newspaper explained that the recent improvements in artificial intelligence technologies exceeded Gates’ expectations by a large margin, and made the “Claude Code” tool a major reason for changing his view of the speed of this development and prompted him to speak publicly about it. This tool, which relies on artificial intelligence agents, allows developers to assign programming tasks via the command line to write, modify, and correct errors, after Anthropic reviewed it last May.
In a lengthy article on his blog “Gates Notes,” Gates warned that the transition to the era of artificial intelligence will be “one of the most turbulent periods in human history,” criticizing the world’s insufficient preparation to face its repercussions, and noting that software engineering will be among the first areas affected, along with sales, customer service, and supporting legal work.
Despite his previous warnings that these technologies double the efficiency of developers and gradually affect job demand in the sector, Gates pointed out that there may be a factor that limits the size of the losses, which is that the decrease in the cost of software development may stimulate increased demand for it and mitigate the decline in jobs, especially if specific tasks such as design remain better accomplished by human hands.
