Comment by grahar64
19 days ago
"Wait 6 months" has been the call for 3-4 years now. You can't eulogize a profession that hasn't been killed, that's just mean.
19 days ago
"Wait 6 months" has been the call for 3-4 years now. You can't eulogize a profession that hasn't been killed, that's just mean.
This is what I don't really understand. It's a bit difficult to take "wait x months" at face value because I've been hearing it for so long. Wait x months for what? Why hasn't it happened yet?
Things seem to be getting better from December 2022 (chatgpt launch), sure, but is there a ceiling we don't see?
"Self-driving cars" and Fusion power also come to mind. With the advent of photography, it was widely believed that drawing and painting would vanish as art forms. Radio would obsolete newspapers, becoming obsolete themselves with television, and so on. Don't believe the hype.
Kind of funny that some of those wait-6-month people are basically the same ones behind "no human driven cars being sold after 2025" and "computer vision is all you need"
My car has driven me back and forth with no issues for 6 months now. But yes it's been a long time coming.
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And yet.. my car was surrounded by 5 self-driving cars with no people in them on the way to work on Thursday.
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Um.. Claude Code has been out less than a YEAR.. and the lift in capability in the last year has been dramatic.
It does seem probable based on progress that in 1-2 more model generations there will be little need to hand code in almost any domain. Personally I already don't hand code AT ALL, but there are certainly domains/languages that are under performing right now.
Right now with the changes this week (Opus 4.6 and "teams mode") it already is another step function up in capability.
Teams mode is probably only good for greenfield or "green module" development but I'm watching a team of 5 AI's collaborating and building out an application module by module. This is net new capability for the tool THIS WEEK (Yes I am aware of earlier examples).
I don't understand how people can look at this and then be dismissive of future progress, but human psychology is a rich and non-logical landscape.
Because then you won't be important, the model will be important. And then everyone will have to use their model, that's their dream. Why isn't that your nightmare too? Why will you be special if it can just code whatever it needs to code? Then anthropic can just employ all the programmers that will ever be needed, to just review new skills and modules of code. It was predicted early on there would be a need for about six big computers worldwide. Well now we'll just need six AI shepherds. And then literally everyone else will forget how anything works because it will be a solved problem. People already treat computers like magic, it will literally become a dark art. And I guess it's fine, what can we do, right? Go with the flow I guess. "If I don't , someone else will. Maybe I can be one of those six real people at Anthropic".
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Just a couple more trillion dollars, we are so close!
Things have progressed much faster than even the most optimistic predictions, so every "wait 6 months" has come true. Just look at how the discourse has changed on HN. No-one is using the arguments from 6 months ago and any argument today will probably be equally moot in 6 months.
Maybe we should look at output like quality of software being produced instead of discourse on forums where AI companies are spending billions to market?
Where is all this new software and increased software quality from all this progression?
It doesn't necessarily enhance or detract from software quality. You could use it for quality assurance or code health initiatives, but you'd have to prioritize that. Obviously it is hard to find a lot of humans who will (be allowed to) choose that over adding some new feature to satisfy the sales guys. And since you measure quality basically on vibes (how many times has this app crashed lately?) it probably takes a while to diffuse from commit to your consciousness. But I have seen it used for the purpose of quality, so I am cautiously optimistic.
Quality shmuality. Get good bro, my app already uses best patterns and you can do all the things and has enterprise SSO and runs on vercel and needs 39 services and costs a few million to run to show you AI generated excel sheets because you cant be bothered to think for a hot minute. We can't have you thinking you might get wrong ideas about ownership. I'm afraid open source was a mistake in the end because it enabled enterprises to iterate faster than they ever could on their own.
Humans are notoriously bad at predicting the future. We can't even reliably predict the weather a week from now.
If we were as smart as the smartest guys throwing trillions at LLMs we wouldn't be predicting anything, we would be creating it like the gods we were always meant to be ever since someone hurt our feelings irrevocably. Hitler could have been a painter, these guys could be slinging dope for a living but here we are.
But the sentiment has changed significantly over the last 6 months. I think this is the biggest step change in sentiment since ChatGPT 3.5. Someone who said "wait 6 months" 6 months ago would have been "right".