Comment by WhyOhWhyQ
1 day ago
If all AI progress stops soon, then I think you're right. However I think automating almost all software development is not far off from being an engineering problem if one is willing to burn enough tokens. I can imagine it being done right now. Just run 100-1000 claude instances and give them different roles. Some of them take screenshots (probably include better OCR/Screenshot analysis models than whatever Anthropic is running) and act as debuggers / user testers. Some of them do planning. Some of them are managers. Some of them are coders. Etc... I'd bet 100k that I could make Halo 1 in a month or two with this setup (minus the beautiful music, compelling story, quality voice acting, art -- though trashy replacements could be made).
The more time I spend working with LLMs and coding agents to help me build software the less scared I am for my future career.
They let me work so much faster, but that's because they are amplifying my existing skills and experience.
I'm confident I will be able to run rings around non-software-engineers who have access to the same tools for may years to come.
There is so much more to building software than knowing how to write code.
Funnily enough, unrelated to this interaction I just happened to run into one of your articles on qwen-coder because I'm learning about local models.
So do you think that most of the low hanging fruit for improving these tools has already been picked because there's just so much energy going into AI these days? E.g. there's a clear boost by connecting to the internet, by configuring thinking mode, by configuring Agents (which I assume is some kind of specialized thinking mode), etc..., but perhaps the base technology could be leveling off? I was definitely lulled into a false sense of security when GPT5 underperformed, at least in the media, but this was shattered when I tried out claude.
It still feels really early to me. There is so much for us to figure out about how to best use this stuff - if model progress froze today I think we could still spend the next year figuring out new ways to take advantage of what we have today.
Claude Skills just a few weeks ago was one of those ideas that's obvious in hindsight but hadn't been baked into an idea yet.