Comment by LordDragonfang
20 hours ago
> “I think… I don’t know… we might be six to twelve months away from when the model is doing most, maybe all of what SWEs (software engineers) do end to end.”
I think it's disingenuous (as disingenuous as you're accusing these marketing teams of being) to paraphrase that as "being told on one hand that we are 6 months away from AI writing all Code". It's merely stating that it's a real possibility. (It's also disingenuous to use a post complaining about a behavioral regression bug as evidence that it's not progressing)
Dismissing it as impossible is silly, considering how close it already is to a junior dev. Keep in mind that 14 months prior to that statement was before we even had any public reasoning models. Things really are moving that fast, it's just, at the moment, unclear how fast.
We’ve been suggesting that programmers are going to be replaced by simpler programming languages, gui programming tools, no code tools, low code tools, and now AI. The real big step was when Claude code came out and introduced the agentic loop where it could self validate against tests/linters/tooling, but everything after that had been penned as miraculous when IME it’s a new iteration of the same thing - wild hallucinations, getting stuck in deep loops, ignoring explicit instructions and guard rails, wild tangents and just generating stuff that doesn’t work or solve the problem.
> I think it's disingenuous (as disingenuous as you're accusing these marketing teams of being) to paraphrase that as "being told on one hand that we are 6 months away from AI writing all Code". It's merely stating that it's a real possibility
No - you don’t get to make wild predictions and say “oh I didn’t actually mean that, look how succesful we are though”. These teams aren’t saying “hey we think we’re going to majorly influence programming in 6-12 months”, they’re saying “we’re going to replace programmers”. If you can’t stand over your claims, don’t make them. _That’s_ disingenuous.
> We’ve been suggesting that programmers are going to be replaced by simpler programming languages, gui programming tools, no code tools, low code tools, and now AI.
The difference is that it's actually working this time. Non-programmers are writing full apps. Sure, they're simple ones, often just CRUD and UI, but it actually is changing things in a way it never has before. You can't assert something is the same as everything previous when there's already evidence that it's different.
> No - you don’t get to make wild predictions and say “oh I didn’t actually mean that, look how succesful we are though”.
Except that's not what's happening here. I'm criticizing you for misrepresenting what claim was made in the first place. No where in your evidence have you shown anyone "walking the claim back". If anything, TFA is claiming evidence of an LLM doing "most" of what SWEs do "end to end" three months ahead of schedule.
If you want to present evidence Dario (or another CEO -- I'm sure Sama has made much more fantastic claims that you could falsify) made claims that didn't pan out, be my guess, but don't tell falsehoods about the evidence you are presenting.
(And no, I'm not counting breathless tech reporters -- everyone knows how much to trust them when they report a cure for cancer -- they'll say everything is a miracle cure. But the fact that hundreds of "miracle weight loss cures" that never panned out made the new in the past several centuries didn't make GLP1s fake just because they had the same type of hype.)
> The difference is that it's actually working this time. Non-programmers are writing full apps
You can say this about every step along the way. C programmers replaced assembly programmers. Python programmers replaced C programmers. low code tools replaced interal tools teams.
> I'm criticizing you for misrepresenting what claim was made in the first place. No where in your evidence have you shown anyone "walking the claim back".
The claim is that SWES will have their work done by models in 6-12 motnhs. We are _nowhere near_ that 9 months on to it. That's all there is to say it.
> If anything, TFA is claiming evidence of an LLM doing "most" of what SWEs do "end to end" three months ahead of schedule.
TFA based on a model that is so good that it has to be kept from us? from the company that literally can't keep their app up? From the company who shipped an update that didn't launch?
> be my guess, but don't tell falsehoods about the evidence you are presenting.
I mean, I literally posted a quote from the CEO of one of the two major companies saying that SWEs are 6-12 months away from being replaced. This is fantasy talk from a guy who is incentivised to have you believe this. If the claims are that software is changing, and how we're building/deploying software is adapting to that new world then yeah that's fair enough. But the current models, harnesses and tooling are not replacing an SWE unless there's a paradigm shift in the next 3 months. And my point is that we appear t be going backwards, not forwards.
> didn't make GLP1s fake just because they had the same type of hype.
No, GLPs work and that's the difference.