Comment by mccoyb
18 hours ago
I find these blog posts (and the originals, with Anthropic's C compiler and Cursor's browser) somewhat funny, as if they have this enormous power to build ... but they can't build something unique or new. Like the software sucks, but look how powerful the process is (the models are indeed powerful).
And it's a bit of a shame: by virtue of their position (their embedding in the fabric of venture capitalism), it seems like they can only make a subset of things -- what they can make is dictated enormously by capital, as they are engines of capital.
Not sure the point I'm trying to make, I just find it amusing.
Perhaps the point is that it might be more worthwhile to give independent creators a billion dollars to play around with agent swarms if we want to keep diversity in the evolutionary algorithm that is the software industry high.
Because it's mostly a load of crap.
Most of these reusable, automated workflows sound really cool in theory, but in practice either they require a lot of customization (not really reusable) or a lot of babysitting (not really automated).
AI has improved my productivity significantly, I'm not a hater, but we also have to be honest about its (current) limitations. The whole "software factory" thing is just a pipe dream people sell to execs / investors / online courses.
Yes and this can be proven because what Anthropic says and does is vastly different
They say SaaS is dead and you can vibe code any SaaS using Opus and yet despite having Mythos with them they have to use JS terminal to run Claude Code.
Why don't they just vibe code CC? Why doesn't Dario have a 100000 agent swarm to run entirety of Anthropic or at least software department?
They've said for some time that Claude Code is 90% LLM generated code.
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Yes, that's true, but in the post, they even mention that building the spec is the scarce resource.
but that's what we use the agent "swarm" to do .. it's also not scarce. what's scarce is imagination.
We're rediscovering the "architect" job role a decade or so after switching to agile processes and staff engineers largely replaced it. God help us when they rediscover UML for agents.
I feel like the scarcity of (idealized) Product Managers is even more acute.
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I mean, how long are these pages? Assuming 40 or so lines per page, that would be 33400 lines of spec turned into 200,000 lines of Rust, or about 6 lines of code per line of spec. That's a very detailed spec, much more than any software specification I have ever written in my career. It's not obvious to me that writing this spec would meaningfully save work over incrementally building individual features, especially when you think about what it would take for human beings to meaningfully review whether those 835 pages contain the right intent.
not only that, but what all of this misses is the fact that the specification that they used was a product of writing the software, not the other way round. It would be much, much more difficult to first write a correct specification than to first write a correct program, because programs are formal systems that can be executed to observe their correctness. You can’t do that with a specification.
Or to validate the accuracy and efficacy of the actual code produced.
Well, the tool works well. I am grateful that Nature has seen fit that the same kind of person who can make it doesn’t also have the ability to identify what needs exist in the market because then all software would flow out of OpenAI and Anthropic and the rest of us would run about their legs and peep about. Whether product development will survive the next generation of models is still unknown.
bro it can't even make a button that doesn't look like it was designed in 2018, everything is ass. Product development isn't going anywhere.
it feels kind of like a concept car a large manufacturer would show off at a motor show. Everyone knows there is no intention to actually ship that thing, but they're exploring concepts and technology and trying to make inroads in what comes next.
The bottleneck has always been on the product side for 99% of cases. For the 1% where it's engineering, LLMs don't help as much.