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> In many advanced software teams, developers no longer write the code; they type in what they want, and AI systems generate the code for them. What a wild and

> In many advanced software teams, developers no longer write the code; they type in what they want, and AI systems generate the code for them. What a wild and speculative claim. Is there any source for this information?

loloquwowndueo 10mo ago
Probably their googly-eyed vibe coder friend told them this and they just parroted it.
- RajT88 10mo ago
  Right. The author is non-technical and said so up front.
interstice 10mo ago
If true I’d like to know who is doing this so I can have exactly nothing to do with them.
rprend 10mo ago
AI writes most of the code for most new YC companies, as of this year.
- brazukadev 10mo ago
  That explains the low quality of all launch HN this year
  - block_dagger 10mo ago
    Stats/figures to backup the low quality claim?
    - esseph 10mo ago
      If you have them, post them.
  - 59nadir 10mo ago
    YC companies have pretty much always been overhyped trivial bullshit. I'm not surprised it's even worse nowadays, but it's never been more than a dog and pony show for bullshit.
- nickorlow 10mo ago
  I think this is is less significant b/c 1. Most of these companies are AI companies & would want to say that to promote whatever tool they're building 2. Selection b/c YC is looking to fund companies embracing AI 3. Building a greenfield project with AI to the quality of what you need to be a YC-backed company isn't particularly "world-class"
  - rprend 10mo ago
    They’re not lying when they say they have AI write their code, so it’s not just promotion. They will thrive or die from this thesis. If present YC portfolio companies underperform the market in 5-10 years, that’s a strong signal for AI skeptics. If they overperform, that’s a strong signal that AI skeptics were wrong. 3. You are absolutely right. New startups have greenfield projects that are in-distribution for AI. This gives them faster iteration speed. This means new companies have a structural advantage over older companies, and I expect them to grow faster than tech startups that don’t do this. Plenty of legacy codebases will stick around, for the same reasons they always do: once you’ve solved a problem, the worst thing you can do is rewrite your solution to a new architecture with a better devex. My prediction: if you want to keep the code writing and office culture of the 2010s, get a job internally at cloud computing companies (AWS, GCP, etc). High reliability systems have less to gain from iteration speed. That’s why airlines and banks maintain their mainframes.
    - dmurvihill 10mo ago
      How do you know they’re not lying?
- tapoxi 10mo ago
  So they don't own the copyright to most of their code? What's the value then?
  - esafak 10mo ago
    They do. Where did you get this? All the providers have clauses like this: "4.1. Generally. Customer and Customer’s End Users may provide Input and receive Output. As between Customer and OpenAI, to the extent permitted by applicable law, Customer: (a) retains all ownership rights in Input; and (b) owns all Output. OpenAI hereby assigns to Customer all OpenAI’s right, title, and interest, if any, in and to Output." https://openai.com/policies/services-agreement/ https://openai.com/policies/services-agreement/
    - shakna 10mo ago
      The outputs of AI are most likely in the public domain. As automated process output are public domain, and the companies claim fair use when scraping, making the input unencumbered, too. It wouldn't be OpenAI holding copyright - it would be no one holding copyright.
      - deleted 10mo ago
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      - bcrosby95 10mo ago
        Courts have already leaned this way too, but who knows what'll happen when companies with large legal funds enter the arena.
      - macrolime 10mo ago
        So you're saying machine code is public domain if it's compiled from C? If not, why would AI generated code be any different?
        tapoxi 10mo ago
        Monkey Selfie case, setting the stage for an automated process is not enough to declare copyright over a work.
block_dagger 10mo ago
I'm on a team like this currently. It's great when everyone knows how to use the tools and spot/kill slop and bad context. Generally speaking, good code gets merged and MUCH more quickly than in the past.
whoknowsidont 10mo ago
It's not. And if your team is doing this you're not "advanced." Lots of people are outing themselves these days about the complexity of their jobs, or lack thereof. Which is great! But it's not a +1 for AI, it's a -1 for them.
- NewsaHackO 10mo ago
  Part of the issue is that I think you are underestimating the number of people not doing "advanced" programming. If it's around ~80-90%, then that's a lot of +1s for AI
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  - whoknowsidont 10mo ago
    Why do you feel like I'm underestimating the # of people not doing advanced programming?
    - NewsaHackO 10mo ago
      Theoretically, if AI can do 80-90% of programming jobs (the ones not in the "advanced" group), that would be an unequivocal +1 for AI.
      - whoknowsidont 10mo ago
        I think you're crossing some threads here.
        NewsaHackO 10mo ago
        "It's not. And if your team is doing this you're not "advanced." Lots of people are outing themselves these days about the complexity of their jobs, or lack thereof. Which is great! But it's not a +1 for AI, it's a -1 for them. " Is you, right?
sethammons 10mo ago
At $WORK, we have a bot that integrates with Slack that sets up minor PRs. Adjusting tf, updating endpoints, adding simple handlers. It does pretty well. Also in a case of just prose to code, Claude wrote up a concurrent data migration utility in Go. When I reviewed it, it wasn't managing goroutines or waitgroups well, and the whole thing was a buggy mess and could not be gracefully killed. I would have written it faster by hand, no doubt. I think I know more now and the calculus may be shifting on my AI usage. However, the following day, my colleague needed a nearly identical temporary tool. A 45 minute session with Claude of "copy this thing but do this other stuff" easily saved them 6-8 hours of work. And again, that was just talking with Claude. I am doing a hybrid approach really. I write much of my scaffolding, I write example code, I modify quick things the ai made to be more like I want, I set up guard rails and some tests then have the ai go to town. Results are mixed but trending up still. FWIW, our CEO has declared us to be AI-first, so we are to leverage AI in everything we do which I think is misguided. But you can bet they will be reviewing AI usage metrics and lower wont be better at $WORK.
- chickensong 10mo ago
  > it wasn't managing goroutines or waitgroups well, and the whole thing was a buggy mess and could not be gracefully killed First pass on a greenfield project is often like that, for humans too I suppose. Once the MVP is up, refactor with Opus ultrathink to look for areas of weakness and improvement usually tightens things up. Then as you pointed out, once you have solid scaffolding, examples, etc, things keep improving. I feel like Claude has a pretty strong bias for following existing patterns in the project.
- yellow_lead 10mo ago
  You should periodically ask Claude to review random parts of code to pump your metrics.
  - giancarlostoro 10mo ago
    Has the net benefit that it points out things that are actually wrong and overlooked.
johnfn 10mo ago
I only write around 5% of the code I ship, maybe less. For some reason when I make this statement a lot of people sweep in to tell me I am an idiot or lying, but I really have no reason to lie (and I don't think I'm an idiot!). I have 10+ years of experience as an SWE, I work at a Series C startup in SF, and we do XXMM ARR. I do thoroughly audit all the code that AI writes, and often go through multiple iterations, so it's a bit of a more complex picture, but if you were to simply say "a developer is not writing the code", it would be an accurate statement. Though I do think "advanced software team" is kind of an absurd phrase, and I don't think there is any correlation with how "advanced" the software you build is and how much you need AI. In fact, there's probably an anti-correlation: I think that I get such great use out of AI primarily because we don't need to write particularly difficult code, but we do need to write a lot of it. I spend a lot of time in React, which AI is very well-suited to. EDIT: I'd love to hear from people who disagree with me or think I am off-base somehow about which particular part of my comment (or follow-up comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46222640 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46222640) seems wrong. I'm particularly curious why when I say I use Rust and code faster everyone is fine with that, but saying that I use AI and code faster is an extremely contentious statement.
- MontyCarloHall 10mo ago
  >I only write around 5% of the code I ship, maybe less. >I do thoroughly audit all the code that AI writes, and often go through multiple iterations Does this actually save you time versus writing most of the code yourself? In general, it's a lot harder to read and grok code than to write it [0, 1, 2, 3]. For me, one of the biggest skills for using AI to efficiently write code is a) chunking the task into increments that are both small enough for me to easily grok the AI-generated code and also aligned enough to the AI's training data for its output to be ~100% correct, b) correctly predicting ahead of time whether reviewing/correcting the output for each increment will take longer than just doing it myself, and c) ensuring that the overhead of a) and b) doesn't exceed just doing it myself. [0] https://mattrickard.com/its-hard-to-read-code-than-write-it https://mattrickard.com/its-hard-to-read-code-than-write-it [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... [2] https://trishagee.com/presentations/reading_code/ https://trishagee.com/presentations/reading_code/ [3] https://idiallo.com/blog/writing-code-is-easy-reading-is-hard https://idiallo.com/blog/writing-code-is-easy-reading-is-har...
kscarlet 10mo ago
The line right after this is much worse: > Coding performed by AI is at a world-class level, something that wasn’t so just a year ago. Wow, finance people certainly don't understand programming.
- mcv 10mo ago
  World class? Then what am I? I frequently work with Copilot and Claude Sonnet, and it can be useful, but trusting it to write code for anything moderately complicated is a bad idea. I am impressed by its ability to generate and analyse code, but its code almost never works the first time, unless it's trivial boilerplate stuff, and its analysis is wrong half the time. It's very useful if you have the knowledge and experience to tell when it's wrong. That is the absolutely vital skill to work with these systems. In the right circumstances, they can work miracles in a very short time. But if they're wrong, they can easily waste hours or more following the wrong track. It's fast, it's very well-read, and it's sometimes correct. That's my analysis of it.
  - deleted 10mo ago
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  - formerly_proven 10mo ago
    Copilot is easily the worst (and probably slowest) coding agent. SOTA and Copilot don't even inhabit similar planes of existence.
    - RobinL 10mo ago
      I've found Opus 4.5 in copilot to be very impressive. Better than codex CLI in my experience. I agree Copilot definitely used to be absolutely awful.
      - whimsicalism 10mo ago
        cursor is better than both, i wish this weren’t the case tbph
brulard 10mo ago
I'm on a team like that and I see it happening in more and more companies around. Maybe "many" does a heavy lifting in the quoted text, but it is definitely happening.
deleted 10mo ago
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qsort 10mo ago
Everyone is doing this extreme pearl clutching around the specific wording. Yeah, it's not 100% accurate for many reasons, but the broader point was about employment effects, it doesn't need to completely replace every single developer to have a sizable impact. Sure, it's not there yet and it's not particularly close, but can you be certain that it will never be there? Error bars, folks, use them.
20after4 10mo ago
I've had claude code compose complex AWS infrastructure (using pulumi IAC) that mostly works from a one-shot prompt.
dist-epoch 10mo ago
source: me I wrote 4000 lines of Rust code with Codex - a high throughput websocket data collector. Spoiler: I do not know Rust at all. I discussed possible architectures with GPT/Gemini/Grok (sync/async, data flow, storage options, ...), refined a design and then it was all implemented with agents. Works perfectly, no bugs.
- sefrost 10mo ago
  I would be interested in a web series (podcast or video) where people who do not know a language create something with AI. Then somebody with experience building in that technology reviews the code and gives feedback on it. I am personally progressing to a point where I wonder if it even matters what the code looks like if it passes functional and unit tests. Do patterns matter if humans are not going to write and edit the code? Maybe sometimes. Maybe not other times.
- mjr00 10mo ago
  Since when is a 4000 line of code project "advanced software"? That's about the scope of a sophomore year university CompSci project, something where there's already a broad consensus AI does quite well.
  - keeda 10mo ago
    I think you're parsing the original claim incorrectly. "Advanced software teams" does not mean teams who write advanced software, these are software teams that are advanced :-)
  - kanbankaren 10mo ago
    4K was never advanced software. Even in the 90s, a typical Enterprise sofware was several 100 KLOC. A decade later, it had grown to a few million LOC while system software are also similar size.
- dmurvihill 10mo ago
  Very cool. Let’s see it!
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9rx 10mo ago
It's not exactly wrong. Not since the advent of AI systems (a.k.a. compilers) have developers had to worry about code. Instead they type in what they want and the compiler generates the code for them. Well, except developers have never had to worry about code as even in the pre-compiler days coders, a different job done by a different person, were responsible for producing the code. Development has always been about writing down what you want and letting someone or something else generate the code for you. But the transition from human coders to AI coders happened like, what, 60-70 years ago? Not sure why this is considered newsworthy now.
- IceDane 10mo ago
  I'm wondering: do you genuinely not understand how compilers work at all or is there some deeper point to your AI/compiler comparison that I'm just not getting?
  - 9rx 10mo ago
    My understanding is that compilers work just like originally described. I type out what I want. I feed that into a compiler. It takes that input of what I want and generates code. Is that not your understanding of how compilers work? If a compiler does not work like that, what do you think a complier does instead?
    - IceDane 10mo ago
      A compiler does so deterministically and there is no AI involved.
      - 9rx 10mo ago
        A compiler can be deterministic in some cases, but not necessarily so. A compiler for natural language cannot be deterministic, for example. It seems you're confusing what a compiler is with implementation details. Let's get this topic back on track. What is it that you think a compiler does if not take in what you typed out for what you want and use that to generate code?
dboreham 10mo ago
> What a wild and speculative claim. Is there any source for this information? Not sure it's a wild speculative claim. Claiming someone had achieved FTL travel would fall into that category. I'd call it more along the lines of exaggerated. I'll make the assumption that what I do is "advanced" (not React todo apps: Rust, Golang, distributed systems, network protocols...) and if so then I think: it's pretty much accurate. That said, this is only over the past few moths. For the first few years of LLM-dom I spent my time learning how they worked and thinking about the implications for understanding of how human thinking works. I didn't use them except to experiment. I thought my colleagues who were talking in 2022 about how they had ChatGPT write their tests were out of their tiny minds. I heard stories about how the LLM hallucinated API calls that didn't exist. Then I spent a couple of years in a place with no easy code and nobody in my sphere using LLMs. But then around six months ago I began working with people who were using LLMs (mostly Claude) to write quite advanced code so I did a "wait what??..." about-face and began trying to use it myself. What I found so far is that it's quite a bit better than I am at various unexpected kinds of tasks (finding bugs, analyzing large bodies of code then writing documentation on how it works, looking for security vulnerabilities in code) or at least it's much faster. I also found that there's a whole art to "LLM Whispering" -- how to talk to it to get it to do what you want. Much like with humans, but it doesn't try to cut corners nor use oddball tech that it wants on its resume. Anyway, YMMV, but I'd say the statement is not entirely false, and surely will be entirely true within a few years.
its_ethan 10mo ago
Is it not sort of implied by the stats later: "Revenues from Claude Code, a program for coding that Anthropic introduced earlier this year, already are said to be running at an annual rate of $1 billion. Revenues for the other leader, Cursor, were $1 million in 2023 and $100 million in 2024, and they, too, are expected to reach $1 billion this year." Surely that revenue is coming from people using the services to generate code? Right?
- browningstreet 10mo ago
  Generating code isn’t the same as running it, running it on production, and living with it over time. In time I’m sure it will, but it’s still early days, land grab time.
- Windchaser 10mo ago
  A back-of-the-napkin estimate of software developer salaries: There are some ~1.5 million software developers in the US per BLS data, or ~4 million if using a broader definition Median salary is $120-140k. Let's say $120k to be conservative. This puts total software developer salaries at $180 billion. So, that puts $1 billion in Claude revenue in perspective; only about 0.5% of software developer salaries. Even if it only improved productivity 5%, it'd be paying for itself handily - which means we can't take the $1 billion in revenues to indicate that it's providing a big boost in productivity.
  - lovich 10mo ago
    You are ignoring costs The AI companies are currently lighting dollars on fire if you pay them a few pennies to do so. The AI models are actually accomplishing something, but the unit economics aren't there to support it being profitable
  - dmurvihill 10mo ago
    If it makes a 5% improvement, that would make it a $9 billion dollar per year industry. What’s our projected capex for AI projects next five years again?
- 10mo ago
agumonkey 10mo ago
Seen it first hand. scan your codebase, plan extension or rewrite or both, iterate with some hand holding and off you go. And it was not even an advanced developer driving the feature (which is concerning).
no_wizard 10mo ago
Here's the lede they buried: >The key is to not be one of the investors whose wealth is destroyed in the process of bringing on progress. They are a VC group. Financial folks. They are working largely with other people's money. They simply need not hold the bag to be successful. Of course they don't care if its a bubble or not, at the end of the day, they only have to make sure they aren't holding the bag when it all implodes.
- venturecruelty 10mo ago
  They have "capital" in their domain name. Of course they're going to be, well... on the side of capital. This shouldn't be hotly debated... "Mining company says mine they own is full of ore and totally not out of ore."
throwaway2037 10mo ago
I completely agree. This guy is way outside his area of expertise. For those unaware, Howard Marks is a legendary investment manager with a decades-long impressive track record. Additionally, these "insights" letters are also legendary in the money management business. Personally, I would say his wisdom is one notch below Warren Buffett. I am sure he is regularly asked (badgered?) by investors what he thinks about the current state and future of AI (LLMs) and how it will impact his investment portfolio. The audience of this letter is investors (real and potential), as well as other investment managers.
- throwaway2037 10mo ago
  Follow-up: This letter feels like a "jump the shark" moment. Ref: https://blog.codinghorror.com/has-joel-spolsky-jumped-the-shark/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/has-joel-spolsky-jumped-the-sh...
  - urxvtcd 10mo ago
    First time reading this. It's actually funny how disliking exceptions seemed crazy then but it's pretty normal now. And writing a new programming language for a certain product, well, it could turn out to be pretty cool, right? It's how we get all those Elms and so on.
    - alterom 10mo ago
      That's how we got Rust.
    - throwaway2037 10mo ago
      > disliking exceptions seemed crazy then but it's pretty normal now Help me to clarify. Are you saying that when Joel posted (~20 years ago), disliking exceptions was considered crazy? And, now it is normal to dislike exceptions? Assuming that my interpretation is correct, then I assume that you are a low level systems programmer -- C, C++, Rust, etc? Maybe even Golang? If you are doing bog standard enterprise programming with Python, Java or C#, exceptions are everywhere and unavoidable. I am confused. If anything, the last 20 years have cemented the fact that people should be able to choose a first class citizen (language) that either has exceptions or not. The seven languages that I mentioned are all major and have billions of lines of legacy code in companies and open source projects. They aren't going anywhere soon. C++ is a bit special because you can use a compiler flag to disable exceptions... so C++ can be both. (Are there other languages like that? I don't know any. Although, I think that Microsoft has a C language extension that allows throw/catch!)
projektfu 10mo ago
I have heard many software developers confidently tell me "pilots don't really fly the planes anymore" and, well, that's patently false but also the jetliners autopilots do handle much of the busy work during cruise, and sometimes during climb-out and approach. And they can sometimes land themselves, but not efficiently enough for a busy airport.
- coffeebeqn 10mo ago
  Autopilot based on a LLM would guarantee I’d never fly again
  - projektfu 10mo ago
    That would be scary, thankfully I don't think anyone would seriously consider it. But I could see other systems based on similar models being useful. Obstacle avoidance, emergency decision-making, etc. There are many places where a private solo pilot can get overwhelmed and make poor decisions or ignore important information.
Illniyar 10mo ago
I think he might be misrepresenting it a bit, but from what I've seen every software company I know of heavily uses agentic AI to create code (except some highly regulated industries). It has become a standard tool, in the same way that most developers code with an IDE, most developers use agentic AI to start a task (if not to finish it).
stretchwithme 10mo ago
It's often true. But not when it's easier to code than to explain.
whimsicalism 10mo ago
Wow, reading these comments and I feel like I've entered a parallel reality. My job involves implementing research ML and I use it literally all the time, very fascinating to see how many have such strong negative reactions. As long as you are good at reviewing code, spec-ing carefully, and make atomic changes - why would you not be using this basically all the time?
- LtWorf 10mo ago
  Because carefully spec-ing to the level an llm needs, and ultra carefully checking the output is easily slower and more tiring than just doing it yourself. Kinda like having a child "help" you cook basically. But for the child you do it because they actually learn. llms do not learn in that sense.
  - whimsicalism 10mo ago
    not at all true for the latest generation of models in my experience. they are overly verbose but except for the simplest simplest changes it is faster to ask first
    - LtWorf 10mo ago
      For the simplest changes you have to first review the code fully, ask for the change, do a new full review and so on.
      - whimsicalism 10mo ago
        no, you just have to ask for the change - wait ~minute, review. and if it’s a small change, review goes fast. typically i’ll have a zellij/tmux with lazygit one pane, a cli agent (cursor-agent or codex) in the other, and a pop up vim pane. i can see the changes in lazygit as they’re made and review immediately and commit
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AndrewKemendo 10mo ago
I just did a review and 16% of our committed production code was generated by an LLM. Almost 80% of our code comments are LLM This is mission critical robotics software
- Zafira 10mo ago
  What is the approach here? LLM generated; human validated?
  - AndrewKemendo 10mo ago
    Yes
thenaturalist 10mo ago
No, but there are huuuuuge incentives by people publishing such statements.
PurpleRamen 10mo ago
Yes and no. There is the infamous quote of Microsoft, about 30%(?) of their code being written by AI now. And technically, it's probably not that such a wild claim in certain areas. AI is very good at barfing up common popular patterns, and companies have a huge amount of patternized software, like UIs, tests, documentation or marketing-fluff. So it's quite easy to "outsource" such grunt-work if AI has the necessary level. But to say that they don't write any code at all, it's really stretched. Maybe I'm not good enough at AI-assisted and vibe coding, but code-quality always seems to drop down really hard the moment one steps a bit outside the common patterns.
- grumbelbart2 10mo ago
  I found LLLMs to be very good of writing (unit) tests for my code, for example. They just don't get tired iterating over all corner cases. Those tests easily, in LoC, dwarf the actual implementation. Not sure if that would count towards the 30%, for example.

loloquwowndueo 10mo ago

Probably their googly-eyed vibe coder friend told them this and they just parroted it.

RajT88 10mo ago
Right. The author is non-technical and said so up front.

interstice 10mo ago

If true I’d like to know who is doing this so I can have exactly nothing to do with them.

rprend 10mo ago

AI writes most of the code for most new YC companies, as of this year.

brazukadev 10mo ago
That explains the low quality of all launch HN this year
- block_dagger 10mo ago
  Stats/figures to backup the low quality claim?
  - esseph 10mo ago
    If you have them, post them.
- 59nadir 10mo ago
  YC companies have pretty much always been overhyped trivial bullshit. I'm not surprised it's even worse nowadays, but it's never been more than a dog and pony show for bullshit.
nickorlow 10mo ago
I think this is is less significant b/c 1. Most of these companies are AI companies & would want to say that to promote whatever tool they're building 2. Selection b/c YC is looking to fund companies embracing AI 3. Building a greenfield project with AI to the quality of what you need to be a YC-backed company isn't particularly "world-class"
- rprend 10mo ago
  They’re not lying when they say they have AI write their code, so it’s not just promotion. They will thrive or die from this thesis. If present YC portfolio companies underperform the market in 5-10 years, that’s a strong signal for AI skeptics. If they overperform, that’s a strong signal that AI skeptics were wrong. 3. You are absolutely right. New startups have greenfield projects that are in-distribution for AI. This gives them faster iteration speed. This means new companies have a structural advantage over older companies, and I expect them to grow faster than tech startups that don’t do this. Plenty of legacy codebases will stick around, for the same reasons they always do: once you’ve solved a problem, the worst thing you can do is rewrite your solution to a new architecture with a better devex. My prediction: if you want to keep the code writing and office culture of the 2010s, get a job internally at cloud computing companies (AWS, GCP, etc). High reliability systems have less to gain from iteration speed. That’s why airlines and banks maintain their mainframes.
  - dmurvihill 10mo ago
    How do you know they’re not lying?
tapoxi 10mo ago
So they don't own the copyright to most of their code? What's the value then?
- esafak 10mo ago
  They do. Where did you get this? All the providers have clauses like this: "4.1. Generally. Customer and Customer’s End Users may provide Input and receive Output. As between Customer and OpenAI, to the extent permitted by applicable law, Customer: (a) retains all ownership rights in Input; and (b) owns all Output. OpenAI hereby assigns to Customer all OpenAI’s right, title, and interest, if any, in and to Output." https://openai.com/policies/services-agreement/ https://openai.com/policies/services-agreement/
  - shakna 10mo ago
    The outputs of AI are most likely in the public domain. As automated process output are public domain, and the companies claim fair use when scraping, making the input unencumbered, too. It wouldn't be OpenAI holding copyright - it would be no one holding copyright.
    - deleted 10mo ago
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    - bcrosby95 10mo ago
      Courts have already leaned this way too, but who knows what'll happen when companies with large legal funds enter the arena.
    - macrolime 10mo ago
      So you're saying machine code is public domain if it's compiled from C? If not, why would AI generated code be any different?
      - tapoxi 10mo ago
        Monkey Selfie case, setting the stage for an automated process is not enough to declare copyright over a work.

block_dagger 10mo ago

I'm on a team like this currently. It's great when everyone knows how to use the tools and spot/kill slop and bad context. Generally speaking, good code gets merged and MUCH more quickly than in the past.

whoknowsidont 10mo ago

It's not. And if your team is doing this you're not "advanced." Lots of people are outing themselves these days about the complexity of their jobs, or lack thereof. Which is great! But it's not a +1 for AI, it's a -1 for them.

NewsaHackO 10mo ago
Part of the issue is that I think you are underestimating the number of people not doing "advanced" programming. If it's around ~80-90%, then that's a lot of +1s for AI
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- whoknowsidont 10mo ago
  Why do you feel like I'm underestimating the # of people not doing advanced programming?
  - NewsaHackO 10mo ago
    Theoretically, if AI can do 80-90% of programming jobs (the ones not in the "advanced" group), that would be an unequivocal +1 for AI.
    - whoknowsidont 10mo ago
      I think you're crossing some threads here.
      - NewsaHackO 10mo ago
        "It's not. And if your team is doing this you're not "advanced." Lots of people are outing themselves these days about the complexity of their jobs, or lack thereof. Which is great! But it's not a +1 for AI, it's a -1 for them. " Is you, right?

sethammons 10mo ago

At $WORK, we have a bot that integrates with Slack that sets up minor PRs. Adjusting tf, updating endpoints, adding simple handlers. It does pretty well. Also in a case of just prose to code, Claude wrote up a concurrent data migration utility in Go. When I reviewed it, it wasn't managing goroutines or waitgroups well, and the whole thing was a buggy mess and could not be gracefully killed. I would have written it faster by hand, no doubt. I think I know more now and the calculus may be shifting on my AI usage. However, the following day, my colleague needed a nearly identical temporary tool. A 45 minute session with Claude of "copy this thing but do this other stuff" easily saved them 6-8 hours of work. And again, that was just talking with Claude. I am doing a hybrid approach really. I write much of my scaffolding, I write example code, I modify quick things the ai made to be more like I want, I set up guard rails and some tests then have the ai go to town. Results are mixed but trending up still. FWIW, our CEO has declared us to be AI-first, so we are to leverage AI in everything we do which I think is misguided. But you can bet they will be reviewing AI usage metrics and lower wont be better at $WORK.

chickensong 10mo ago
> it wasn't managing goroutines or waitgroups well, and the whole thing was a buggy mess and could not be gracefully killed First pass on a greenfield project is often like that, for humans too I suppose. Once the MVP is up, refactor with Opus ultrathink to look for areas of weakness and improvement usually tightens things up. Then as you pointed out, once you have solid scaffolding, examples, etc, things keep improving. I feel like Claude has a pretty strong bias for following existing patterns in the project.
yellow_lead 10mo ago
You should periodically ask Claude to review random parts of code to pump your metrics.
- giancarlostoro 10mo ago
  Has the net benefit that it points out things that are actually wrong and overlooked.

johnfn 10mo ago

I only write around 5% of the code I ship, maybe less. For some reason when I make this statement a lot of people sweep in to tell me I am an idiot or lying, but I really have no reason to lie (and I don't think I'm an idiot!). I have 10+ years of experience as an SWE, I work at a Series C startup in SF, and we do XXMM ARR. I do thoroughly audit all the code that AI writes, and often go through multiple iterations, so it's a bit of a more complex picture, but if you were to simply say "a developer is not writing the code", it would be an accurate statement. Though I do think "advanced software team" is kind of an absurd phrase, and I don't think there is any correlation with how "advanced" the software you build is and how much you need AI. In fact, there's probably an anti-correlation: I think that I get such great use out of AI primarily because we don't need to write particularly difficult code, but we do need to write a lot of it. I spend a lot of time in React, which AI is very well-suited to. EDIT: I'd love to hear from people who disagree with me or think I am off-base somehow about which particular part of my comment (or follow-up comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46222640 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46222640) seems wrong. I'm particularly curious why when I say I use Rust and code faster everyone is fine with that, but saying that I use AI and code faster is an extremely contentious statement.

MontyCarloHall 10mo ago
>I only write around 5% of the code I ship, maybe less. >I do thoroughly audit all the code that AI writes, and often go through multiple iterations Does this actually save you time versus writing most of the code yourself? In general, it's a lot harder to read and grok code than to write it [0, 1, 2, 3]. For me, one of the biggest skills for using AI to efficiently write code is a) chunking the task into increments that are both small enough for me to easily grok the AI-generated code and also aligned enough to the AI's training data for its output to be ~100% correct, b) correctly predicting ahead of time whether reviewing/correcting the output for each increment will take longer than just doing it myself, and c) ensuring that the overhead of a) and b) doesn't exceed just doing it myself. [0] https://mattrickard.com/its-hard-to-read-code-than-write-it https://mattrickard.com/its-hard-to-read-code-than-write-it [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... [2] https://trishagee.com/presentations/reading_code/ https://trishagee.com/presentations/reading_code/ [3] https://idiallo.com/blog/writing-code-is-easy-reading-is-hard https://idiallo.com/blog/writing-code-is-easy-reading-is-har...

kscarlet 10mo ago

The line right after this is much worse: > Coding performed by AI is at a world-class level, something that wasn’t so just a year ago. Wow, finance people certainly don't understand programming.

mcv 10mo ago
World class? Then what am I? I frequently work with Copilot and Claude Sonnet, and it can be useful, but trusting it to write code for anything moderately complicated is a bad idea. I am impressed by its ability to generate and analyse code, but its code almost never works the first time, unless it's trivial boilerplate stuff, and its analysis is wrong half the time. It's very useful if you have the knowledge and experience to tell when it's wrong. That is the absolutely vital skill to work with these systems. In the right circumstances, they can work miracles in a very short time. But if they're wrong, they can easily waste hours or more following the wrong track. It's fast, it's very well-read, and it's sometimes correct. That's my analysis of it.
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- formerly_proven 10mo ago
  Copilot is easily the worst (and probably slowest) coding agent. SOTA and Copilot don't even inhabit similar planes of existence.
  - RobinL 10mo ago
    I've found Opus 4.5 in copilot to be very impressive. Better than codex CLI in my experience. I agree Copilot definitely used to be absolutely awful.
    - whimsicalism 10mo ago
      cursor is better than both, i wish this weren’t the case tbph

brulard 10mo ago

I'm on a team like that and I see it happening in more and more companies around. Maybe "many" does a heavy lifting in the quoted text, but it is definitely happening.

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qsort 10mo ago

Everyone is doing this extreme pearl clutching around the specific wording. Yeah, it's not 100% accurate for many reasons, but the broader point was about employment effects, it doesn't need to completely replace every single developer to have a sizable impact. Sure, it's not there yet and it's not particularly close, but can you be certain that it will never be there? Error bars, folks, use them.

20after4 10mo ago

I've had claude code compose complex AWS infrastructure (using pulumi IAC) that mostly works from a one-shot prompt.

dist-epoch 10mo ago

source: me I wrote 4000 lines of Rust code with Codex - a high throughput websocket data collector. Spoiler: I do not know Rust at all. I discussed possible architectures with GPT/Gemini/Grok (sync/async, data flow, storage options, ...), refined a design and then it was all implemented with agents. Works perfectly, no bugs.

sefrost 10mo ago
I would be interested in a web series (podcast or video) where people who do not know a language create something with AI. Then somebody with experience building in that technology reviews the code and gives feedback on it. I am personally progressing to a point where I wonder if it even matters what the code looks like if it passes functional and unit tests. Do patterns matter if humans are not going to write and edit the code? Maybe sometimes. Maybe not other times.
mjr00 10mo ago
Since when is a 4000 line of code project "advanced software"? That's about the scope of a sophomore year university CompSci project, something where there's already a broad consensus AI does quite well.
- keeda 10mo ago
  I think you're parsing the original claim incorrectly. "Advanced software teams" does not mean teams who write advanced software, these are software teams that are advanced :-)
- kanbankaren 10mo ago
  4K was never advanced software. Even in the 90s, a typical Enterprise sofware was several 100 KLOC. A decade later, it had grown to a few million LOC while system software are also similar size.
dmurvihill 10mo ago
Very cool. Let’s see it!

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9rx 10mo ago

It's not exactly wrong. Not since the advent of AI systems (a.k.a. compilers) have developers had to worry about code. Instead they type in what they want and the compiler generates the code for them. Well, except developers have never had to worry about code as even in the pre-compiler days coders, a different job done by a different person, were responsible for producing the code. Development has always been about writing down what you want and letting someone or something else generate the code for you. But the transition from human coders to AI coders happened like, what, 60-70 years ago? Not sure why this is considered newsworthy now.

IceDane 10mo ago
I'm wondering: do you genuinely not understand how compilers work at all or is there some deeper point to your AI/compiler comparison that I'm just not getting?
- 9rx 10mo ago
  My understanding is that compilers work just like originally described. I type out what I want. I feed that into a compiler. It takes that input of what I want and generates code. Is that not your understanding of how compilers work? If a compiler does not work like that, what do you think a complier does instead?
  - IceDane 10mo ago
    A compiler does so deterministically and there is no AI involved.
    - 9rx 10mo ago
      A compiler can be deterministic in some cases, but not necessarily so. A compiler for natural language cannot be deterministic, for example. It seems you're confusing what a compiler is with implementation details. Let's get this topic back on track. What is it that you think a compiler does if not take in what you typed out for what you want and use that to generate code?

dboreham 10mo ago

> What a wild and speculative claim. Is there any source for this information? Not sure it's a wild speculative claim. Claiming someone had achieved FTL travel would fall into that category. I'd call it more along the lines of exaggerated. I'll make the assumption that what I do is "advanced" (not React todo apps: Rust, Golang, distributed systems, network protocols...) and if so then I think: it's pretty much accurate. That said, this is only over the past few moths. For the first few years of LLM-dom I spent my time learning how they worked and thinking about the implications for understanding of how human thinking works. I didn't use them except to experiment. I thought my colleagues who were talking in 2022 about how they had ChatGPT write their tests were out of their tiny minds. I heard stories about how the LLM hallucinated API calls that didn't exist. Then I spent a couple of years in a place with no easy code and nobody in my sphere using LLMs. But then around six months ago I began working with people who were using LLMs (mostly Claude) to write quite advanced code so I did a "wait what??..." about-face and began trying to use it myself. What I found so far is that it's quite a bit better than I am at various unexpected kinds of tasks (finding bugs, analyzing large bodies of code then writing documentation on how it works, looking for security vulnerabilities in code) or at least it's much faster. I also found that there's a whole art to "LLM Whispering" -- how to talk to it to get it to do what you want. Much like with humans, but it doesn't try to cut corners nor use oddball tech that it wants on its resume. Anyway, YMMV, but I'd say the statement is not entirely false, and surely will be entirely true within a few years.

its_ethan 10mo ago

Is it not sort of implied by the stats later: "Revenues from Claude Code, a program for coding that Anthropic introduced earlier this year, already are said to be running at an annual rate of $1 billion. Revenues for the other leader, Cursor, were $1 million in 2023 and $100 million in 2024, and they, too, are expected to reach $1 billion this year." Surely that revenue is coming from people using the services to generate code? Right?

browningstreet 10mo ago
Generating code isn’t the same as running it, running it on production, and living with it over time. In time I’m sure it will, but it’s still early days, land grab time.
Windchaser 10mo ago
A back-of-the-napkin estimate of software developer salaries: There are some ~1.5 million software developers in the US per BLS data, or ~4 million if using a broader definition Median salary is $120-140k. Let's say $120k to be conservative. This puts total software developer salaries at $180 billion. So, that puts $1 billion in Claude revenue in perspective; only about 0.5% of software developer salaries. Even if it only improved productivity 5%, it'd be paying for itself handily - which means we can't take the $1 billion in revenues to indicate that it's providing a big boost in productivity.
- lovich 10mo ago
  You are ignoring costs The AI companies are currently lighting dollars on fire if you pay them a few pennies to do so. The AI models are actually accomplishing something, but the unit economics aren't there to support it being profitable
- dmurvihill 10mo ago
  If it makes a 5% improvement, that would make it a $9 billion dollar per year industry. What’s our projected capex for AI projects next five years again?
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agumonkey 10mo ago

Seen it first hand. scan your codebase, plan extension or rewrite or both, iterate with some hand holding and off you go. And it was not even an advanced developer driving the feature (which is concerning).

no_wizard 10mo ago

Here's the lede they buried: >The key is to not be one of the investors whose wealth is destroyed in the process of bringing on progress. They are a VC group. Financial folks. They are working largely with other people's money. They simply need not hold the bag to be successful. Of course they don't care if its a bubble or not, at the end of the day, they only have to make sure they aren't holding the bag when it all implodes.

venturecruelty 10mo ago
They have "capital" in their domain name. Of course they're going to be, well... on the side of capital. This shouldn't be hotly debated... "Mining company says mine they own is full of ore and totally not out of ore."

throwaway2037 10mo ago

I completely agree. This guy is way outside his area of expertise. For those unaware, Howard Marks is a legendary investment manager with a decades-long impressive track record. Additionally, these "insights" letters are also legendary in the money management business. Personally, I would say his wisdom is one notch below Warren Buffett. I am sure he is regularly asked (badgered?) by investors what he thinks about the current state and future of AI (LLMs) and how it will impact his investment portfolio. The audience of this letter is investors (real and potential), as well as other investment managers.

throwaway2037 10mo ago
Follow-up: This letter feels like a "jump the shark" moment. Ref: https://blog.codinghorror.com/has-joel-spolsky-jumped-the-shark/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/has-joel-spolsky-jumped-the-sh...
- urxvtcd 10mo ago
  First time reading this. It's actually funny how disliking exceptions seemed crazy then but it's pretty normal now. And writing a new programming language for a certain product, well, it could turn out to be pretty cool, right? It's how we get all those Elms and so on.
  - alterom 10mo ago
    That's how we got Rust.
  - throwaway2037 10mo ago
    > disliking exceptions seemed crazy then but it's pretty normal now Help me to clarify. Are you saying that when Joel posted (~20 years ago), disliking exceptions was considered crazy? And, now it is normal to dislike exceptions? Assuming that my interpretation is correct, then I assume that you are a low level systems programmer -- C, C++, Rust, etc? Maybe even Golang? If you are doing bog standard enterprise programming with Python, Java or C#, exceptions are everywhere and unavoidable. I am confused. If anything, the last 20 years have cemented the fact that people should be able to choose a first class citizen (language) that either has exceptions or not. The seven languages that I mentioned are all major and have billions of lines of legacy code in companies and open source projects. They aren't going anywhere soon. C++ is a bit special because you can use a compiler flag to disable exceptions... so C++ can be both. (Are there other languages like that? I don't know any. Although, I think that Microsoft has a C language extension that allows throw/catch!)

projektfu 10mo ago

I have heard many software developers confidently tell me "pilots don't really fly the planes anymore" and, well, that's patently false but also the jetliners autopilots do handle much of the busy work during cruise, and sometimes during climb-out and approach. And they can sometimes land themselves, but not efficiently enough for a busy airport.

coffeebeqn 10mo ago
Autopilot based on a LLM would guarantee I’d never fly again
- projektfu 10mo ago
  That would be scary, thankfully I don't think anyone would seriously consider it. But I could see other systems based on similar models being useful. Obstacle avoidance, emergency decision-making, etc. There are many places where a private solo pilot can get overwhelmed and make poor decisions or ignore important information.

Illniyar 10mo ago

I think he might be misrepresenting it a bit, but from what I've seen every software company I know of heavily uses agentic AI to create code (except some highly regulated industries). It has become a standard tool, in the same way that most developers code with an IDE, most developers use agentic AI to start a task (if not to finish it).

stretchwithme 10mo ago

It's often true. But not when it's easier to code than to explain.

whimsicalism 10mo ago

Wow, reading these comments and I feel like I've entered a parallel reality. My job involves implementing research ML and I use it literally all the time, very fascinating to see how many have such strong negative reactions. As long as you are good at reviewing code, spec-ing carefully, and make atomic changes - why would you not be using this basically all the time?

LtWorf 10mo ago
Because carefully spec-ing to the level an llm needs, and ultra carefully checking the output is easily slower and more tiring than just doing it yourself. Kinda like having a child "help" you cook basically. But for the child you do it because they actually learn. llms do not learn in that sense.
- whimsicalism 10mo ago
  not at all true for the latest generation of models in my experience. they are overly verbose but except for the simplest simplest changes it is faster to ask first
  - LtWorf 10mo ago
    For the simplest changes you have to first review the code fully, ask for the change, do a new full review and so on.
    - whimsicalism 10mo ago
      no, you just have to ask for the change - wait ~minute, review. and if it’s a small change, review goes fast. typically i’ll have a zellij/tmux with lazygit one pane, a cli agent (cursor-agent or codex) in the other, and a pop up vim pane. i can see the changes in lazygit as they’re made and review immediately and commit
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AndrewKemendo 10mo ago

I just did a review and 16% of our committed production code was generated by an LLM. Almost 80% of our code comments are LLM This is mission critical robotics software

Zafira 10mo ago
What is the approach here? LLM generated; human validated?
- AndrewKemendo 10mo ago
  Yes

thenaturalist 10mo ago

No, but there are huuuuuge incentives by people publishing such statements.

PurpleRamen 10mo ago

Yes and no. There is the infamous quote of Microsoft, about 30%(?) of their code being written by AI now. And technically, it's probably not that such a wild claim in certain areas. AI is very good at barfing up common popular patterns, and companies have a huge amount of patternized software, like UIs, tests, documentation or marketing-fluff. So it's quite easy to "outsource" such grunt-work if AI has the necessary level. But to say that they don't write any code at all, it's really stretched. Maybe I'm not good enough at AI-assisted and vibe coding, but code-quality always seems to drop down really hard the moment one steps a bit outside the common patterns.

grumbelbart2 10mo ago
I found LLLMs to be very good of writing (unit) tests for my code, for example. They just don't get tired iterating over all corner cases. Those tests easily, in LoC, dwarf the actual implementation. Not sure if that would count towards the 30%, for example.