Comment by hansmayer
1 day ago
Their CEO claims a lot of wild shit. He claimed in January this year, that in about 2-3 weeks from this moment, i.e. "in 6 months" that AI will be doing all of SWE work. Lets hold these people accountable for a change!
1 day ago
Their CEO claims a lot of wild shit. He claimed in January this year, that in about 2-3 weeks from this moment, i.e. "in 6 months" that AI will be doing all of SWE work. Lets hold these people accountable for a change!
> "in 6 months" that AI will be doing all of SWE work
I assume this is the quote you're referring to from Davos?
"I have engineers within Anthropic who say I don’t write any code anymore. I just let the model write the code, I edit it. I do the things around it… we might be six to twelve months away from when the model is doing most, maybe all of what SWEs do end to end."
that was in Jan, he said "might" and he said 6-12 months. Yes! Let's hold him accountable for saying reasonable things!
Reasonable things? He said the same shit over and over over the last several years. Yes, lets hold him accountable - you don't make such "oopsies" accidentally, several times in a row.
Seems pretty reasonable to me. Timescales are hard for anyone to predict. He is forced to do these predictions to know how much compute to buy in advance. Surprisingly, he underbought compute and now has to scramble to secure it from xAI or wherever he can. So he was overly conservative...
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I work in big tech and probably 90% of code over the last month has been written by AI. And I suspect it's probably higher within Anthropic, which is probably what he's basing his opinion on.
So, he's closer to correct than not.
That said, your recollection is also flawed. It was in mid-March, and here's the relevant quotes:
>I think we’ll be there in three to six months—where AI is writing 90 percent of the code. And then in twelve months, we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code.
[...]
>But the programmer still needs to specify, you know, what are—what are the conditions of what you’re doing, what—you know, what is the overall app you’re trying to make, what’s the overall design decision? How do we collaborate with other code that’s been written? You know, how do we have some common sense on whether this is a secure design or an insecure design?
[...]
>So as long as there are these small pieces that a programmer, a human programmer, needs to do, the AI isn’t good at, I think human productivity will actually be enhanced. But on the other hand, I think that eventually all those little islands will get picked off by AI systems.
With another 3-4 months left on the clock, his prediction seems remarkably on point for at least certain organizations and domains.
I welcome you to also hold yourself accountable in the coming months if this trend continues. ;)
> And I suspect it's probably higher within Anthropic
That probably explains why their uptime and reliability are so bad.
Written, but was it reviewed? Do you need to edit code written by LLM?
I agree that most of the things are written by AI but writting code was never the bottleneck in big tech.
Yep! We have a review process where we have a few agents, each tuned to a particular domain of expertise (security, code quality, etc) which iterate until the feedback meets a certain threshold, at which point it goes over to humans for (hopefully) final review.
That said, I generally agree that you're correct: writing code in many ways has not been the biggest bottleneck. However, by removing much of that writing, it frees up engineers to work on the uniquely human things that are larger bottlenecks.
I had a few comments in a thread here touching on where I think most of the value has come from for us (which is largely search/understanding of our dependencies and making away team work far more viable, which aids with cutting through bureaucracy and the tendency for teams to push back on work): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48298731
Haven't you heard - these days they just throw slop generated by LLM agents over to other LLM agents which cosplay as internal QA. They know it works because they write really strict .MD files where they instruct agents in English language to 'never do this' and 'always do that'.
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> I welcome you to also hold yourself accountable in the coming months if this trend continues. ;)
My company did not swallow hundreds of billions in shady investment deals and is not publicly traded. We work with real money, and the revenue on our books is the revenue that is actually booked, not fake revenue we plan in 2 years time to maybe happen. So no, I am not going to hold myself accountable. But people who work with other people's money should be absolutely held accountable when their wild imaginations don't come true, repeatedly, quarter after quarter, year after year!
I think he means hold yourself accountable when it turns out your predictions and pessimism don't age well.
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I will note that you have essentially not responded to anything specific in my comment, nor at least acknowledged that you misstated Dario Amodei's actual prediction.
Elon playbook