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Anthropic's CEO says in 3-6 months, AI will write 90% of the code (March 2025)
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- danparsonson 1y agoMan selling shovels reports that every job requires a new shovel. Or in other words, of course he says that; it's not really a useful analysis is it?
- Fizzadar 1y ago100%. How is this even remotely considered newsworthy.
- rasz 1y agoRay Kassar, CEO of Atari, says every Atari 2600 owner will buy at least 3 copies of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial!
- vunderba 1y agoAwesome. Reminds me of when Atari produced more copies of the 2600 port of Pac-Man than there were consoles on the bafflingly over-optimistic prediction that people would rush out and buy a 2600 just to be able to play it.
- crinkly 1y agoTechnically man selling shit and shovels. Or is it shovels that make shit.
- akaike 1y agoCouldn’t it easily also take over the CEO job? Pretty sure it’s easier than producing code that works and is maintainable.
- sameermanek 1y agoGiven how much these CEOs are hallucinating these days while hopelessly losing money on every venture they pursue, I think AI is leaps and bounds ahead of these idiots for decision making.
- ben_w 1y agoI once asked a CEO, what a CEO's job involves. Apparently it's lots of fiduciary duties. As with driving cars, even if the AI is strictly better at doing these tasks than they are at writing code, mistakes aren't so easy to recover from and can destroy something unrecoverably in a 5-second attention lapse from a human overseer.
- akaike 1y agoWell, the same goes for wrong code. One wrong line can cost millions or destroy everything completely, depending on the context. It is also not very easy to recover from.
- ben_w 1y agoThe two contexts where that applies is "interacts with the outside world and you deployed without tests", and "even though it only affects your own data, you don't have backups and you deployed without tests".
- gf000 1y agoSo can software, if not more. Like, your healthcare data leaking, bank account losing your money, some legal document getting lost/wrongly issued, .. and then we didn't even talk about actual safety critical applications (which are hopefully not vibe coded) like airplanes/medical device, etc.
- ben_w 1y agoAI is software, so in a sense everything that can go wrong with AI must be a subset of things that can go wrong with software. Lots of software has a test environment. Even in live, e.g. bank account losing your money the transactions can be un-wound. And that's the difference when it comes to replacing software devs with LLMs vs replacing CEOs with LLMs: it's possible to write the tests and then lock them. And to perform code review before changes are merged into the main branch. And to test against something other than production. I know the Board can in principle remove a CEO, but is there even a standardised way for a CEO to have a vice-CEO that always checks everything they do, that always tests their commands against a simulation of the company and only lets them proceed if they agree with the outcome? The point is that "AI as CEO" would be in the category of "business-critical" software, and also that current approaches to AI also lack sufficient guarantees of obligation compliance or sufficient defence against failures, which in the banking example would be things like the AI deciding to save money by deleting the system capable of unwinding incorrect banking transactions. To the extent this kind of failure mode happens with vibe coding (in the original coining of the term: always accept without reading), it's like letting the LLM modify the unit tests to always succeed regardless of the code.
- onename 1y agoMeanwhile: Nearly half of all code generated by AI found to contain security flaws - even big LLMs affected https://www.techradar.com/pro/nearly-half-of-all-code-generated-by-ai-found-to-contain-security-flaws-even-big-llms-affected https://www.techradar.com/pro/nearly-half-of-all-code-genera...
- VBprogrammer 1y agoNow do Junior Devs...
- tdhz77 1y agoAll devs
- righthand 1y agoAll senior devs are now junior devs, that’s why we stopped hiring juniors. Give me them downvotes all you want but I’m not the “senior” turning in slop Llm code.
- JCM9 1y agoAre most junior devs honestly any better? In my experience no.
- fzeroracer 1y agoIn my experience, junior devs are actually better about this because they haven't been ground down by years of corporate bullshit and shellacking whenever they bring up security holes or issues. Some of them will be a bit over eager and miss obvious stuff but unlike LLMs you can actually train them to be better about it.
- VBprogrammer 1y agoYeah, to be honest I agree. I've worked with senior people who couldn't give a crap, "it works" is the only barrier to shipping it. I've also worked with juniors who are technically much better than most of the senior people around them.
- tobyhinloopen 1y agoI use AI a lot while coding and even I don't get close to 90%.
- JCM9 1y agoProbably a bit ambitious, but I do see a future not too far off where junior and mid-tier developer roles basically disappear.
- BoingBoomTschak 1y agoThing is that experiencde programmers must start at "junior" like any other...
- JCM9 1y agoYou’re not wrong, but there’s a glut of junior developer talent at the moment that there’s no shortage of folks to take on those most senior roles. This this is a “tomorrow” problem that (for better or worse) will get ignored for now
- thom 1y agoI suppose the question is whether the only way to educate good programmers is for them to spend time as a (possibly net-negative) apprentice in an enterprise job. Perhaps under the watchful and patient gaze of future AIs, they're able to blossom earlier, perfect their skills on open source, and enter into the workforce ready not to cause chaos. Personally I'd love the alternative version of the future where LLMs do all the bullshit (meetings, alignment, planning) and then seniors feel far less stress and pressure and rejoice in being able to spend time raising up their fellow humans. Not sure either outcome is likely though.
- z3c0 1y agoAmodei's work history indicates that his background as a software developer is a single part-time job that he held for a year-and-a-half after college. As far as I'm concerned, he wouldn't even make it as a junior on my team. I'm not inclined to believe anything he says about what it takes to write production-ready code.
- urquhartfe 1y agoWell, he still has a month I guess
- 0xflarion 1y agoI remember 2018-2020, when everyone was saying that in 1-2 years, all cars would be autonomous vehicles and we won't need drivers anymore. Guess what.
- jimsimmons 1y agoAnd how solving the trolley problem is the key to make it all work
- pera 1y agoI still remember this one from 2016 very well: A Driverless Tesla Will Travel From L.A. to NYC by 2017, Says Musk https://www.nbcnews.com/business/autos/driverless-tesla-will-travel-l-nyc-2017-says-musk-n670206 https://www.nbcnews.com/business/autos/driverless-tesla-will...
- bboygravity 1y agoReally not that far off in the grand scheme of things IMO. Ray Kurzweil was even more on the money in his 2006 book "The singularity is near". I remember reading some of the stuff in there that is now happening. From the top of my head he predicted 2030 for human-level AI hardware and software that could be bought for 1000 USD by anyone. I feel he's going to be very close.
- crinkly 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tesla_Autopilot_crashes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tesla_Autopilot_crashe...
- bufferoverflow 1y ago[dead]
- mettamage 1y agoHey, this is perhaps a bit random. But do you want to chat a bit about your math journey? I saw it here [1]. I'm curious about it. If you're (potentially) up for it, my email is in my profile. Cheers! [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44899552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44899552
- dachworker 1y agoI mean, trivially true, if you consider that AI-enhanced programming requires 1000% more code written, deleted and rewritten, countless times, by AI itself in it's feeble attempt to "reason" about the problem.
- crinkly 1y agoI remember calling bullshit on this well over a year ago. I was shot down by my colleagues and management. I will remind them about this on Monday :)
- verdverm 1y agoI had my doubts, then I spent time getting to know how to work with and instruct them, game changer that you don't want to write off in arrogance
- password321 1y agoSo when will we get AI automating AI development?
- ben_w 1y agoThat started years ago. Exactly when depends what you count, but part of the path leading to ChatGPT was getting a bunch of dumb systems to work together to train a smarter system: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.08593 https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.08593 fig 1, and also section 4.4 for what can go wrong
- password321 1y agoIt wasn't a serious comment but my point was about seeing Anthropic/OpenAI replace its own software engineers.
- heisenbit 1y agoI'm fairly sure in 3-6 months 90% of CEO pronouncements are prepared with AI.
- fleebee 1y agoAs a note to future historians, this sounded just as crazy back in March.
- newsclues 1y agoHas an AI tool been used to develop a new programming language (perhaps that is better for AI than existing programming languages? Or another way, if Rust didn't exist, could an AI create Rust?
- wordofx 1y agoI would have to go searching and can’t be bothered. But there was a guy on Twitter earlier this year who said he had been wanting to create his own programming language for years and with AI he’s been doing it finally. I cannot for the life of me remember what it was called.
- saint_yossarian 1y agoYou're probably thinking of https://github.com/ghuntley/cursed https://github.com/ghuntley/cursed. It... certainly seems to live up to its name.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- z3c0 1y ago1700 directories at the project root...
- kosolam 1y ago“Writing the code” is not the same as programming. The ai WRITES most of the code for me, but I’m still doing 95% of the PROGRAMMING.
- ethan_smith 1y agoExactly. The AI writes the implementation details while I'm still doing the actual programming: defining problems, designing architectures, ensuring correctness, and making the difficult tradeoffs that require domain knowledge and judgment.
- verdverm 1y agoI wonder how much of the sessions will be used to train up agents that can do more of the programming. I'm certainly providing lots of feedback so they don't mess up so often in the future Someone also said extending this pattern into the future is probably why computers in Star Trek mess up
- bboygravity 1y agoWriting the code? How about reading it and explaining it? Working on undocumented legacy code (read: probably the majority of all embedded code in the world) is now like 100x faster. No need to plow through a massive codebase and trying to grasp expired toolchains for weeks/months anymore. How is that not part of programming?
- ath3nd 1y agoGitHub CEO delivers stark message to developers: "Embrace AI or get out." (then proceeds to get out himself, 7 days later) https://www.businessinsider.com/github-ceo-developers-embrace-ai-or-get-out-2025-8?IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/github-ceo-developers-embrac... https://www.theverge.com/news/757461/microsoft-github-thomas-dohmke-resignation-coreai-team-transition https://www.theverge.com/news/757461/microsoft-github-thomas... This industry is full of snake oil salesmen and false promises, it's reliant on hype and an army of fanboys trained on twitter to fan the flames and create the impression of a revolution that isn't there and might never be there, just to prop the valuations of the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic. It always follows the same playbook: - The guru type e.g muskie, sama, adam neumann, elizabeth holmes, SBF, says something on twitter: "XYZ is the future" - Army of same-thinkers lurkers start getting excited about it. - VC fund bros who are also forming their opinion on vibes stalking twitter, also get excited about it. - Big money poured in XYZ thing. - Guru keeps claiming that XYZ version 2.0 is just behind the corner (AGI/Superintelligence, Autonomous Self Driving Cars, the Boring Tunnel, cure for whatever) projecting insane and out of touch with reality timelines. - XYZ thing either becomes the future (not likely), or gets abandoned (remember when buying pixelized pics of apes on the internet was an "investment"?) and the collective amnesia of the fanbase doesn't keep the guru accountable. It's easy to make hundreds of claims if getting it right once, even by chance, makes you some kind of a prophet and all your wrong claims of the past are dismissed due to your fanbase's dog-like adoration for you. - Cycle repeats. The LLM craze reminds me of the NFT, web3, crypto grift all over again, but this time with a product that at least has some value. Tom Renner wrote an excellent article on the "LLM inevitabilism" https://tomrenner.com/posts/llm-inevitabilism/ https://tomrenner.com/posts/llm-inevitabilism/
- r0ckarong 1y agoNobody said anything about working software.
- poniko 1y agoDid some bigger admin tool to do search and matching datapoints etc and decided to only use claude code. First version was wow awesome this saved me so much time .. now 2 weeks later putting back code that was deleted several times, removing 3 copy's of the same code, way to complicated sqls, verbose code and looking how its mixing htmx with some wird own JavaScript. It really looks as a junior developer solutions, so I'm done using it for more then boiler plate things.. I will come back in 3-6 months and hope its better to understand its own limitations. I'm guessing it would be less then a week for me to write it on my own. The biggest issue is that I've now seen the shit it creates so I have zero trust in the code I now have from a security and stability standpoint. I know many have better experiences then mine.
- verdverm 1y agoHave you tried agent instructions? They have been helping with these issues
- anonzzzies 1y agoThe thing is that this is probably currently indeed happening. The bizarre output of LoC by LLMs probably now eclipses whatever humans write by hand. I don't believe 90% passes the reviews though; a lot more gets written and a lot more gets discarded. My fear is more that this will change, and code will pass because less and less people know what is good or not. Not yet, but soon-ish, EVEN if the output quality does not improve.
- bboygravity 1y ago90 percent definitely passes reviews. Source: my commits pass reviews and it's not because the reviewers don't have like 50 years of experience between them. It's funny how the comments on HN went from complete denial about coding with LLM's ever being possible at all like 1 year ago to "oh, it might be happening" now. I find it hard to understand how people can simultaneously be skilled (older) engineers while at the same time being completely oblivious to the concept of exponential improvement of tech in general. I guess people don't WANT to see the reality that is change and prefer to just look away and cope?
- anonzzzies 1y agoI am unsure but as a formal verification (pupil of dijkstra and his students in eindhoven and Amsterdam) person, I see this happening in a crazy waterfall and indeed people on HN are the last deniers who keep saying 'it does not work for them'. It works for the rest of the world and things are going completely ape shit now. I am happy to be old as I probably won't live through the fallout; I would say I hope we change our ways and redistribute the gained wealth here but it won't happen. And then we also do not learn from having terrible software ruining lives...
- gf000 1y agoBecause we already are in the diminishing returns phase with relation to LLM reasoning capability - exponentials can almost always only exist for short durations.
- bboygravity 1y ago
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- lawgimenez 1y agoThis might be true, but in my experience the code generated by AI are mostly a bunch of bad practices. Project managers be like sending me AI code snippets like they know shit.
- snowstormsun 1y agohttps://youtu.be/9RaGLtJaZjs https://youtu.be/9RaGLtJaZjs
- hakanderyal 1y agoFor CRUD/UI heavy web apps, it can. I have probably wrote ~5% of the code I produced in the last 2 months, but I've read and verified and corrected every line of code. Output increase is substantial. But I'm not expecting that to hold true for linux kernel or postgres codebase or equivalent anytime soon.
- CafeRacer 1y agoIm heavily using claude code right now... because i need something now. But it's a huge pile of technical debt. With every piece of code created i write a doc of what id need to focus on when rewriting chunks. AI has its usage, it makes some things faster... but spitting out more code does not necessarily make it more productive. I ride AI train, but i ride my cb650r same way... sometimes wondering why i am still alive.
- hakanderyal 1y agoWith Claude Code, you need to create the docs beforehand, not after. For my latest project, I have 20k+ lines of markdown docs to guide it, with great success. Some of them are generic rules, some of them describes how I code, some of them describing the codebase & features. Then I have another 17k+ that are used while coding. Plans, phases, todos, reviews etc. All of them are written by Claude Code also. I'm calling it "spec-driven development". Cursor has a much different flow, where you usually pair program with it, which I call "ai-assisted development".
- zarzavat 1y agoI've tried this approach but at some point you're just coding in a less precise language (English), and with more duplication. My current approach is to stub out the architecture I want, write the type definitions I want in full, and ask Claude to fill in the blanks. It's good at implementing an interface but bad at devising the interface on its own.
- hakanderyal 1y ago
- edg5000 1y agoFor me this appears to be true actually, these days. It struggles more with large and terrible codebases though, because it has to ingest so much garbage code in order not to break anything, wheras with nicely strucured code it can do great work on a module level, as long as you direct it well.
- verdverm 1y agoI just did a week with AI coding and it did about 80% That being said, I had to be very detailed and meticulous because they go off the rails and make poor decisions Just means I type and search a lot less, and can get things out of my head and into computers much faster
- mojuba 1y agoThere was a wave of outsourcing of engineering jobs to countries with cheaper labor back in the 1990s and 2000s, all at the expensive of quality, accompanied by mass layoffs in the western countries of course. The industry was testing the limits of how much lower the bars of quality can go until customers stop paying for software, and as it turned out, customers could tolerate a lot. Now, AI is the new outsourcing it seems. Let's lower the bars of quality, see how much crappiness and glitchiness can be tolerated, freeze it right there as the new "industry standard" and move on to the next cost cutting thing.
- zarzavat 1y ago"AI" has been writing 90% of my code, on a per-character basis, since IntelliSense came out. The question is not how many characters can a computer spit out, but whether you need a human in the loop or not. That's not going to change in 6 months. In a few years, perhaps.
- UmGuys 1y agoIf the general public believes this nonsense, I understand why there's so much AI hype. He's just selling his product like Musk, right? No one with a surface level of context could believe AI will replace all developers by March 2026 and soon after all human employees.
- drivingmenuts 1y agoI actually used to enjoy writing code. I do not enjoy herding a toddler.
- brushyolaf 1y agoI recently got to freelance for a project where a junior dev took over an existing codebase and AI now writes 90% of the code. The codebase is now completely unmaintainable as the AI ignored the underlying abstraction patterns and the Dev is not experienced enough to correct the mistakes. 90% AI, 100% spaghetti code.
- pentaphobe 1y agoIf you don't interpret the intent as "90% of human code will be AI" but instead as "90% of code being created globally" it's probably a really conservative estimate. Creating 9x more code is depressingly easy - but zero correlation to percentage of meaningful output
- insane_dreamer 1y agoMaybe it’s because 90% of new code generated is boilerplate CRUD?
- Garlef 1y agoI remember from the early days of midjourney (and SD,etc) that there was a point in time where midjourney had created more images than the whole of humanity had created in its entire existence up to that point (or something along the lines) ... But volume is just not the same as impact. I guess the share of code that gets actually used and was written by AI is still tiny.
- herval 1y agoFor me personally, it has been writing about 90% of all the frontend and ios/swift code I get to write and about half the backend code.
- lordkrandel 1y agoI love how people believe demonstrated sociopathic liars like CEOs